New York - The Novel

Catskills and the Adirondack Mountains offered a viable terrain through which to lay a canal. From the Hudson, the canal ran westward all the way to the edge of the Great Lakes in the Midwest.
    “Here,” said Weston, “just below Lake Ontario and above Lake Erie, lies the town of Buffalo. All kinds of produce come in there. And the canal ends just below Buffalo.”
    “So now we can use the canal to ship goods east instead of south?”
    “Exactly. Bringing loads overland is expensive, and slow. But barges filled with grain can get from Buffalo to New York in only six days. As for the cost … that drops from a hundred to only five dollars a ton. It’ll change everything. The wealth of the West will flow through New York.”
    “Not so good for New Orleans, I guess.”
    “No … Well, that’s their problem.”
    Yesterday, Weston and Frank had spent the day inspecting the final sections of the canal. Those had been happy hours. An engineer had shown them round. Frank had been doing what he liked best, and Weston had been proud to see that the engineer was impressed with the boy’s questions.
    But today there was something else he wanted to share with his son.
    He had introduced the subject already, once or twice, during their journey. As they started up the Hudson, he had looked back, past the stately cliffs of the Palisades to where, in the distance, New York harbor was a haze of golden light, and remarked: “It’s a fine sight, isn’t it, Frank?”But it had been hard to tell what the boy was thinking. As they came to West Point, and stared at the splendor of the Hudson Valley as it wound its way northward—a sight that always brought a thrill of romance to his own heart—Weston had again called the scene to his son’s attention. “Mighty fine, Pa,” Frank had said, but only, his father suspected, because he reckoned it was expected of him. As they’d taken the long road westward, passed lakes and mountains, seen magnificent panoramas and gorgeous sunsets, Weston had gently pointed them out, and let the boy take them in.
    For as well as the continent’s scope and wealth, it was America’s spiritual lineaments he wanted to show his son. The vast splendor of the land, the magnificence of its freedom, the glory of nature and its testimony to the sublime. The Old World had nothing better than this—equally picturesque perhaps, but never so grand. Here in the beauty of the Hudson Valley, it stretched to the plains and deserts and soaring mountains of the west: nature, untrameled, under the hand of God. America, as seen by its native sons, for countless centuries before his own ancestors came. He wanted to share it with his son, and see its mighty wonder thrill the boy’s heart.
    That’s why he had brought him here today. If the stupendous sight they were about to see didn’t stir the boy, then he didn’t know what would.
    “Lake Ontario is higher than Lake Erie,” he said quietly to Frank, as they came toward the end of the path, “so as the water flows through the channel that leads between them, it comes to a place where it has to drop. It’s a pretty big drop, as you’ll see.”
    Frank had enjoyed preparing for the journey. Back in the city, he’d been interested, when his father had demonstrated the purpose of the canal on the map. Frank liked maps. In his library, his father also had a big framed print of the commissioners’ plan for New York City. It showed a long, perfect grid of streets. The city had already advanced several miles from its old limits under the British, but the plan was that one day the grid should run all the way up to Harlem. Frank loved the simple, harsh geometry of the plan, and the fact that it was about the future, not the past.
    He’d enjoyed inspecting the canal yesterday, too. The Big Ditch, people called it, for a joke. But there was nothing to joke about really, because the canal was truly amazing. Frank knew every fact about it. The canalplowed its mighty furrow westward for a hundred and sixty miles up the Mohawk River Valley, and then another two hundred miles across to the channel near the town of Buffalo. In the course of its long journey, the level of the canal had to rise six hundred feet, by means of fifty locks, each with a twelve-foot drop. Irish laborers had dug the trench; imported German masons had built its walls.
    Yesterday, he had been allowed to operate the sluices and help move the massive gates of one of the locks, and the engineer had