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. 

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).