The Erie Canal

The Erie Canal from Lock 21 (near New London)

When I was in Miss Underwood’s fourth grade class, our music lesson was one of the highlights of the week. One of our favorite songs was “Low Bridge” (The Erie Canal Song). As fourth-graders we were still not very self-conscious. Therefore, we sang the song unabashedly and at the top of our lungs. Shouting, “Fifteen Miles on the Erie Canal!”  It is one of those songs that is a cherished childhood memory. When the song reached the chorus, we would once again yell, “Low Bridge! Everyone down!” Even today, when I hear references to the Erie Canal, like an earworm, the song filters back into my mind. I can’t but help to recall the opening lines, “I’ve got a mule, her name is Sal.” I find myself, for a few days afterwards, still playing the song in my head on a loop.

A gold finch along the canal

As a fourth grader, I am not sure that that I had a sense of what it meant to be traveling from Albany to Buffalo. I knew that the song was in New York, but that could have been Mars to me. Running 363 miles from Albany to Buffalo, as the song indicates, the canal was a technological triumph of the early nineteenth century. Over the past few years, I have taken a few walking excursions along the Erie Canal. I have thought about the hard life those who worked along the canal, and all canals in the eastern United States, must have had. Today, these paths are primarily for pleasure with blacktop that makes the journey easier. But the journey, hauling barges and battling insects, must have been very difficult. Even though I know this, I can help but thinking of Sal, and the extraordinary adventures of the Erie Canal.