As a journalist you learn to work around your interview subjects\u2019 schedules. But this may have been the first time I had to wait for one of them to disembark from her canoe. <\/p>\n
Z Behl, an artist who divides her time between Claverack, New York and New York City, wasn\u2019t being difficult. The canoe plays a role in the story. Z simply admitted that she finds it challenging to conduct interviews, and even worse to keep the social media beast satisfied, while afloat.
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Z and fellow paddler Kim Moloney are conducting a five-week long canoe performance, known as Mule\u2019s Passage, along the Erie Canal. <\/p>\n
They started in Waterford, New York on Aug. 7 and will end their journey in Buffalo on Sept. 5. <\/p>\n
They\u2019re traveling upstream, meeting people (mostly when they dock), and drawing the community into their project. For example, in Waterford they received a chorale sendoff from singers along Peebles Bridge. It included a sing-along of Erie Canal folk songs. Their odyssey\u2019s sponsors include the New York State Canal Corporation and the Erie Canal Museum.
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As virtuous as their mission sounds – its themes include the invisible labor of women, the canal\u2019s role in the Underground Railroad, and the romance and decline of American industry – I was frankly more interested in the trip\u2019s challenging logistics. <\/p>\n
Z and Kim were speaking to me\u00a0over the phone from\u00a0a Stewart\u2019s in Little Falls, New York after spending the night of Aug. 14 camping there. Stewart\u2019s, it turns out, serves as something of a life preserver – pun only partially intended – from the elements. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s the only place we can get our eggs and the ice coffee is delicious,\u201d Z explained.
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I wasn\u2019t the first person to ask the artists why they were paddling the entire 350 mile length of the canal upstream. <\/p>\n
Z said it was a metaphor for the current state of the world. \u201cYou can never get where you want to go,\u201d Z explained. Kim added, \u201cWe feel like we\u2019re paddling upstream, for sure.\u201d\u00a0
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Navigating a 19-foot canoe acquired in the recesses of Facebook Marketplace and filled with food and equipment – both camping and art-related – sounded reasonably precarious. And that was even before the artist decorated its bow with a donkey head. That\u2019s an homage to the mules that once pulled barges along the canal in the days before motors.\u00a0
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Negotiating the canal\u2019s\u00a036\u00a0locks also sounded iffy to me. Z explained how Lock 17 in Little Falls, which they\u2019d passed through the previous day, worked: they entered the lock alongside a much larger vessel; a giant metal door lowered behind them; the lock filled with six million gallons of water, rising 43 feet, while they clung to a rope on its side. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe started saving little frogs that got trapped in the locks,\u201d Z reported.
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Among the grace notes of their voyage have been the friendships they\u2019ve struck up with the lock tenders along their route. They\u2019ve allowed the team to camp on their lawns and Z to refrigerate her medicine. She\u2019s recovering from a serious bout of Lyme disease.
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The artist is no stranger to monumental efforts. Her \u201cThatcher the Snatcher,\u201d a\u00a025-foot\u00a0sculpture made with Kim from salvaged metal was part of a group show in a Claverack field in 2024. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia commissioned several large works from Z including a 300-foot long snake two years earlier. And the Brooklyn Army Terminal just featured her huge oyster shells made of pigmented concrete and embedded steel.
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And if the women don\u2019t already have their hands full, Mule\u2019s Passage marked the debut of a canoe, not the one they\u00a0were riding, that Z made of Venetian glass for Guy Park Manor in Amsterdam, New York. It recalled the flooding of that historic site by Hurricane Irene in 2011. The paddlers climbed out of their canoe on Aug. 10 and into their art opening with local TV news cameras rolling.
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It\u2019s unlikely that Z could have pulled off the performance – did I mention they also published a Mule\u2019s Passage broadsheet about the show and printed collectible souvenir \u201cCanal Bucks\u201d – without the assistance of the power in the back of the canoe. Kim Moloney, when she\u2019s not working on Z\u2019s sculptures, is one of the few female members of the Iron Workers Union. Her welding career has taken her, among other places, to the heights of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.
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The women also have what they describe as a third paddler. It\u2019s an electric solar charging outboard motor supplied by Bixpy, one of the trip\u2019s sponsors. It does for canoeing what E-bikes do for climbing hills. I\u2019m tempted to buy one myself even though it\u2019s probably overkill for the rowboat on our one-third-acre pond.
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The journey ends at Canalside Buffalo, the city\u2019s waterfront district, on\u00a0Saturday,\u00a0Sept. 5. But the show is hardly over.\u00a0To\u00a0commemorate\u00a0the trip,\u00a0the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse will devote an exhibition to Mule\u2019s Passage in April 2027.<\/p>\n
Ralph Gardner Junior is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found in the Berkshire Eagle and on Substack.<\/p>\n
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As a journalist you learn to work around your interview subjects\u2019 schedules. But this may have been the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":267694,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[136,138,137],"class_list":["post-267693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-erie","tag-erie","tag-erie-headlines","tag-erie-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267693\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}