September 2023 - Love Our Great Lakes

It might seem inconceivable, but I am going to write a post that brings together the topic of the Great Lakes waterway system and Geraldo Rivera.

On August 31, 2023, The New York Times published an article After Fox News, Geraldo Rivera Boats into the Sunset (via Cleveland). The article details Geraldo’s recent journey on his 36-foot luxury motorboat “Belle” from East Hampton, NY, around Manhattan, and into the Hudson River to a route that eventually brought his boat to a marina in Cleveland on Lake Erie. Many of you may not know that Geraldo is one of the more prominent celebrities currently living in Cleveland.

The 8-day journey took Geraldo, his brother, and Belle, through the Erie Canal and 36 locks that would help climb the boat over 600 feet from the waters of the Hudson to Lake Erie. Apparently Geraldo, according to the article, “loves canals”. Who would have guessed?

The article proceeds to intertwine the boat journey with a retrospective of his career (giving credit where due – it’s really an impressive career). But the article reminded me of a question that, not being from a maritime background, I’ve had for a while: How do locks exactly work?

Locks were a very early invention to solve a challenging issue: How do you move boats through a waterway that has elevation change? The earliest basic lock technology dates to China, approximately 900 AD, with the first canal pound lock technology dating to 1373 in the Netherlands. Most locks are built around a watertight container called a lock chamber. There are gates at both ends. Both gates close and a filling valve opens to allow the lock chambers to fill and an emptying valve allows the chamber to empty. Boats can be raised or lowered by the chamber either filling or emptying.

Geraldo traveled through the Erie Canal, which opened in 1825, and connected the Great Lakes region to the Hudson River. Two years later in 1827 the Ohio & Erie Canal opened to connect Lake Erie to the Mississippi River and in 1829 the Welland Canal opened to solve the challenge of moving boats around Niagara Falls.

river between brown leafed trees during daytime

The canals were incredible engineering feats of their time. Pause to consider the human labor involved in that era. While they all have had modifications made in the past 200 years, their width and depth still limit the size of ship that can pass through. This led to the Great Lakes vocabulary of “salties” and “lakers”. Salties are ocean-going ships that in the earliest era were able to pass through the Welland Canal, now part of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Lakers are too large, and stay in the lakes, running cargo between Great Lakes ports where it often travels by train thereafter.

While I don’t boat, I could understand Geraldo’s decision at a life turning point to seek a physical passage that would perhaps facilitate an emotional one. I wish him “plain sailing” in the years to come (derived from nautical term meaning: smooth and easy, as in a course of action or future path).

My family ushered in the summer Memorial Day weekend with a day trip to Kelleys Island in Lake Erie. We closed it out Labor Day weekend with a day trip to Toledo and the National Museum of the Great Lakes. My takeaway from the visit: Immense respect for the role the Great Lakes region played in economy and nation building during the industrial era of the late 19th and first half of the 20th century. The work that happened here was dirty, dangerous, and with hindsight there are plenty of criticisms to lay at the feet of industrialization. But it was an era of ambition and sacrifice and this region, with a variety of rich resources, drove much of the growth and evolution. It was iron ore, coal and limestone that shifted the arc of the industrial age and the Lakes provided the means to move raw material as well as the steel that would build vehicles, railways, infrastructure and eventually skyscrapers across the United States.

The museum has exhibits on exploration and settlement of the region, expansion and industry, safeguard and support, shipwrecks and safety, and maritime technology. Topics that particularly caught my interest and are worthy of their own posts: the history and role of the U.S. Coast Guard in the region; icebreaking in the Lakes to preserve shipping channels; and the Great Lakes most famous shipwreck – the SS Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior in November of 1975. Stay tuned!

By coming in the summer months, we could also tour two boats docked in the Maumee River next to the museum – the Col. James M. Schoonmaker and the Ohio. The Schoonmaker particularly makes an impression. It’s enormous, austere, and stalwart. At 619 feet long and with a carrying capacity of 12,200 gross tons, it’s not hard to imagine the cavernous cargo hold filled with coal, grains and minerals as the boat plows through Great Lakes waters on routes from Duluth to Detroit to Toledo and back.

Before heading home we had a late lunch at the nationally famous Tony Packo’s Cafe. The restaurant is known for its Hungarian food and over 1,000 hot dog buns signed by celebrities and politicians over the past 50 years that adorn the walls (spoiler: the signed buns look real, but are fake). The restaurant was originally made famous by the character Corporal Maxwell Klinger in M*A*S*H, who referenced Tony Packo’s six times in the series (the actor Jamie Farr was from Toledo).

The Midwest is often the brunt of jokes, overlooked, or underappreciated. It’s a region with numerous challenges of a wide variety. But it is a place – one with character, heart, and a rich history that I want my girls to know, analyze, and respect.