NEWS
CLERMONT TRIP
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Rumseian Society Steams Into Fulton's Bicentennial
THURSDAY NIGHT Time to load stuff. We will need eight burlap bags of hardwood chunks for fuel. We need to securely stow them forward in front of the boiler, to weight the tongue of the trailer, but if we stop suddenly they can't fly off and land on somebody's windshield at high speed. Likewise some weighty things like the working beam, the rudder...they have lots of lawyers in NY, yes? Or lots of stock brokers who have lots of lawyers? We don't want to find out, we're lashing it all down and sweating profusely in the humidity. Ernie's very young daughter sees that the boat is a lot like one of those playground boats, fun to clamber over, through and around, so while we stagger about with heavy awkward loads she jumps around underfoot, which makes us sweat even more. Tools. What tools will we need? Which is another way of saying, Will something break, and what? We end up with a small toolbox on board, for the usual little problems, and another bigger box in the truck for the bigger problems. Joel announces he's laid the new license plate on the back end of the trailer for mounting. Ernie puts it on, lays the old one where it was. I don't notice, I go back, take the new one off and begin to re-attach the old one, and somebody stops me. Maybe it is time to hit the hay.
FRIDAY MORNING It seemed OK last night, but in daylight the trailer spare tire looks bad, like something stored in a chickencoop, not only flat but filthy and rattling. A pleasant thought; friday afternoon, NY Thruway, the boat and disabled trailer sitting on the shoulder... So now I run the bad spare tire up to Brown's. I can't imagine it will work, but Ronnie and another guy knock the tire around on the rim and maybe use magic words until it seats and inflates , and suddenly we have a spare. Then we're actually off, a truck hauling a large blue wood boat, followed by Joel's SUV hauling his little red Reelfoot Lake stump-jumper that's to be our tender, followed by another black SUV operated by Don. I ride with Don. He's an ex-Marine. Our caravan takes up a lot of room on a pretty busy road, and we aren't very graceful. Over the next seven hours Don will make observations about the traffic, colorful comments, the kind that would be made by sergeants during grenade practice to men who are slow to throw. Roy, traveling in the truck in front of us, says during one break; Don must be having a good time, he's waving a lot.
FRIDAY AFTERNOON I have somehow gotten us into very downtown Kingston. The map showed roads connecting into single lines, but the road numbers changed around too fast to follow, and now we're on parade. We could set up a PA system and explain why we're here, but most of the neighborhood doesn't look like it would be interested, they've got too many houses to fix. Oh, there's a highway number that's actually on the map. Excellent. Full steam left, up to the next stoplight.
We get to Clermont after closing, and most of the staff is gone. A beautiful white manor house overlooking the river, surround by a large wonderful shaded acreage of lawn and, better yet, gifted with a parking lot big enough for us to park in, and fear no turning around. A cool breeze ruffles the wide, wide Hudson, and it's suddenly a nice, nice day. Pete Baker appears, a friend who's been part of the Fulton group, who've been trying to get a replica of a Fulton steamboat built. Then Tim Otty appears, who works at Clermont, has grown up on the Hudson, and has lots of knowledge about places we can put in. We park the boat and start looking at landings. Clermont no longer has a dock, let alone a launch site; the high-speed Amtrak line on the river has made such things somewhat scarce, and we'll have to launch miles upriver. Tim begins apologizing for the two landings, how they may not work, might be hard to back into. Nonsense. They are both perfect long inclines of concrete with walkways on the side, and docks. While Tim apologizes, we are wondering how to steal the North Germantown one and put it in at Shepherdstown. He's already sent us a depth chart, showing river channels and sand bars, but now he lends us a depth finder, and says he has a native guide, Steve, to help us find our way on the river.
SATURDAY MORNING The North Germantown landing is still gorgeous, but the Hudson has a strong, lively NW wind cutting across it that's kicking up whitecaps. The other steamboats are having a hard time getting upriver against the wind and current, and even pleasure boaters are getting off the river. Sticking up out of the water as far as it does, the Experiment is a lot like a sail, and with only one horsepower we'd be thrown at the rocks on the eastern shore faster than you can say “historical reenactment.” But we'll be the main steamboat attraction today, so we put the boat into the water (gee, it's so EASY here) and securely tie it up at the dock. They're busing people up from Clermont. So, we set up the exhibits of Rumsey's inventions and life, weigh them down with sandbags so they don't blow away, and talk. And talk. Curiously, for all the people coming through, nobody asks, why did you ever bother to build such a thing? At least, until the newspaper reporters arrive. They ask this, and many other questions like, why wasn't Rumsey rich? One amazing thing; the great-great-great grandson of the captain of Fulton's first boat appears...he says his ancestor had a tough job, because all the competing sail and rowing ferries did their best to damage Fulton's steamboat, and would contrive collisions. Not only did he have to learn to operate a steam boat, he had to do it with other captains playing Demolition Derby with him there on the Hudson. Oh, the good old days.
SATURDAY EVENING We're back at Clermont, sitting in front of the parked Experiment. Pete has run out and gotten us some pizza. To entertain people, and rest the crew's vocal chords, Don and I and a local guy named Ernie are playing tunes, Ernie being a great bagpiper ( of kinder, gentler, bellows-blown bagpipes). The humidity makes it hard for me to keep my hammered dulcimer in tune, Don's managing to keep his guitar in pitch, but tin whistle is much less work and so I give up and whistle a lot. Ernie's a minister, and he's discovered that a lot of hymns, when sped up and put into different meters, make excellent jigs, hornpipes, reels. You can actually waltz to Nearer My God To Thee, not just go down with the Titanic to it.
Then we get a guided tour around the new Fulton Bicentennial Exhibit. It took them four years to assemble an impressive collection of steamboat paintings, other artifacts. Americans very early on were noted for their willingness to risk danger in order to go a little faster, and some paintings indeed feature steamboats blowing up. There are also Fulton memorabilia and portraits, china from his first steamboat line, and various artifacts of the Livingstons, the family that bankrolled Fulton's steamboats. They owned not only Clermont, but half of the state of New York and some of Connecticut too. A very useful family for an inventor to have, and he married one of them. There's also a good, long exhibit on the general history of the steamboat and, lo and behold, Rumsey has a section. It's not as big as it should be, of course, and could use some gold leaf and a flashing neon sign saying THE MOST INGENIOUS but we keep this to ourselves. It also has a photo of us, in the Experiment, from about 20 years ago. As befits a museum exhibit, we seem to have been somewhat younger then. Then we head outside for fireworks for the crowds scattered across the lawn.
SUNDAY MORNING It's a perfect day, which is good because it's our last chance, and we jump into it. Fire up the boiler, blow out the crud, fire it up again and blow it out again, and again; the main control valve will eventually become clogged, but the more we get rid of now the longer we can run. People congregate on the dock, and we go for a run. We're out on the river in sight of the dock for a while, chugging about. A guy flys over in an ultralight, snapping pictures, the crowds on the dock change as buses come and go.. Something is sticking in the valve or valve linkage (well, it is the Experiment, after all…) so we come back to the dock, clean the valve out, apply some more grease to it, grease the linkage.
It's one o'clock, time to head downstream. Can we steam down 5 miles to Clermont? No. We don't have nearly enough wood, let alone space on board to stow it, the tide's against us, and the Experiment would balk at such a long, long run. So, we fix a tow rope to Joel's StumpJumper, he fires up the engine, and off we go, Steve the native guide leading us in his boat. The tow takes some time. When we're about halfway, we see another steamboat coming upstream. It gives us a whistle, and a salute with a small cannon. The cannon immediately makes Don, at the tiller, jealous. He asks, why can't we have a cannon? We're infinitely more deserving of a cannon than a silly steam launch. Abe mutters something darkly about possibly going back with two steamboats, instead of one. Well, we'll have to be faster and quieter if we're ever to take up piracy.
We arrive at Clermont, steam up. Something is sticking in the valve linkage again. Right; more grease, more yanking. And we just went over a patch of river weed, and now the condenser doesn't seem to be cooling- the weed has jammed open the condenser flapper valve in the trunkline, so we'll have to dump water in by hand. And now a breeze has come up, and we're sailing downstream a bit…and has the tide turned now? Dan and Roy are stoking the boiler, have a nice conflagration going, Ernie's got plenty of water going into the boiler, Abe is keeping the condenser cool, I have to keep banging the control valve…The Experiment is behaving true to form, never giving us a dull moment on board. But suddenly, look, we've actually steaming upriver past Clermont, exactly 200 years after Fulton did the same thing. We can see people way up on the bank waving, the sun is out, it's a nice day. Happy 200th, Robert Fulton! You may have gotten rich, but Rumsey was here first…Joel in the StumpJumper swings by and Dave shoots some pictures, just in case there would ever be any doubt we were here.
Then it's time to tow the boat back upriver, talk to the crowd on the dock a little more, grab something to eat, haul out the Experiment , tie all the gear down and then quickly…ooof, get on the packed NY Thruway. It's Sunday late afternoon, all the people who live in the city are coming back from the mountains, and we crawl into line with the traffic. On the Experiment, working in the 18th century, we can do four knots if we beat on the engine to make it go. Now, back in the 21st century, we can do sixty knots on this road but we'd have to beat on a lot of cars and trucks to let us get by. History is repeating itself, we're doing four knots again, stopping and starting, but unlike earlier in the day, nobody is waving at us. By the time we squeeze through New York and get home, it's 2:00 AM monday morning. It's been a long, long, historical weekend.
The Rumseian Society thanks the Shepherdstown Street Fest, Jefferson Security Bank, the Knodes, the Shepherdstown Town Council, the many generous citizens of Shepherdstown and the Society members who made it possible to get the Experiment to New York for this event.
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