We decided to go exploring today since our neighbors were ugly and unsociable and we did the right thing. We started by driving to the Eisenhower Lock on the Seaway and watched as it operated, moving ships upstream toward the Great Lakes. We started by watching a movie in the visitor center that may have been made quite some time ago. The narrator and host of the video was Walter Cronkite and he appeared to be about 30 when this piece of journalistic wonder was created. Young Walter explained lots of things about the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway where before was only the St. Lawrence River with rapids and nasty shoals that prevented navigation except by thrill-seekers in rubber rafts or kayaks.
Right about time the movie ended, a ship called the Manitoba pulled into the empty lock and tied up. The gate at the lower end of the lock closed and 7 minutes and 22 million gallons of water later, the upper gate opened and the Manitoba belched out a big cloud of diesel smoke and steamed away up the next section of the Seaway. It is pretty amazing to watch a 650 foot long, 70 foot wide ship rise 48 feet out of a trench right before your eyes. Great mechanical engineering here.
We piled back into Charlotte and drove through a tunnel that passes beneath the lock to an island on the other side of the lock. There is an overlook on that side and we watched an oil tanker pull into the lock and repeat what we had just seen the Manitoba do. It is pretty amazing to watch these boats go through this process. When the ship pulls into the lock, viewers look down on the deck. A few minutes later, they are looking at the side of a ship awaiting the opening of the upper lock gate. Then it fires up and leaves.
We drove around the area of the lock and found two dams that block the rest of the river; one that generates hydroelectric power (which is sold to pay for the lock system) and another which merely regulates the flow of the St. Lawrence. At the visitor center for the hydro dam, we got out to take pictures and found that the 18th of July is some kind of special day and they had a Good Humor truck in the parking lot doling out free ice cream. We stupidly selected Reese’s ice cream bars that taste like cold peanut butter with a thin chocolate coating. Not the best selection we could have made. Maybe we should have selected potato ice cream bars or beet sidewalk sundaes although I don’t know if they had those.
The Seaway is an amazing engineering feat that extends over about 750 miles of territory stretching from Montreal to Lake Superior. The locks within American territory are free to pass through but I understand that those rotten Canadians charge to pass through their seven lock systems. Cheapskates.