Crisis on the Erie Canal
This is possibly not the one you're thinking of. The Erie Canal.
This Erie Canal was not opened in 1825. Nor was it 363 miles in length. It wasn't even... well, this could go on for a while. This was no waterway linking the Great Lakes to New York City, let's just leave it at that.
In the beginning, there wasn't much thought to the name. The project was conceived first, and then a name was put to it when, one day, someone asked me just what the hell that thing was.
"The Erie Canal," I said.
"What?" they asked. "The Erie Canal? After the one from Lake Ontario to New York City?"
Now, I knew the Erie Canal went from Lake Erie, and not as this guy had said, Lake Ontario. All I could think was that the man thought it was a trick question, not that it was an explicit question he had been asked... of course you would expect the Erie Canal to touch off Lake Erie at some point, it only made perfect, obvious sense. So obvious, in fact, it couldn't possibly be the answer. It had to be one of the other lakes in the cluster of Great Lakes... only I couldn't remember all of them... Ontario, Erie... that's it, drawing a blank after that. Michigan! That was another. I would have thought, had I not thought the Erie Canal connected to Lake Erie, that it connected to Lake Ontario, as well, so I didn't judge the guy too harshly. "Yeah," I said, "that one," even though he wasn't technically right. I don't consider myself a nitpicker, and so I didn't, in this case.
And the name stuck.
I had started the project on a whim one morning... I called in sick, rolled out of bed, put on a robe, shuffled downstairs to the kitchen, where I surveyed the back yard and could not escape the urge to run out to the shed, grab a shovel, and start digging a canal across the back yard from the hedge of the neighbors one house down the street at a skewed angle across the yard towards my house, swerving away from the back steps at the last few feet and then down the alleyway for a few feet before stopping. Which I did do because, as I said, it couldn't escape the urge.
It was like my very own hobby horse. It was raining that morning, only slightly, which made digging easy. Well, easier than if it had been in the dead of winter and that rain had been freezing rain or sleet or hail. The rain turned the dirt just beneath the grass to mud as the shovel thwacked into it again and again. Very early on I reached a rhythm, like a metronome that had been stuck in a mud pile and was being flicked back and forth once in a while, when it looked like it was faltering, by a steady and serious hand. Only instead of smoothly going *pock* *pock* I was grunting with every stroke and the shovel clanged and thudded as I hit sometimes dirt, sometimes shale.
It wasn't like Tristram Shandy's Uncle Toby's reenactment of battles. I wasn't counteracting anything or anyone, I wasn't planning a battle. I was digging a canal.
All of which made some degree of sense while I sat, a few hours after beginning, at my kitchen table, staring out at the great, gaping, muddy hold that had started melting out of the hedge and into my back yard. I sipped my coffee and the train of my robe swayed squishily on the linoleum while I pondered my next point of action.
...
To be continued... ?
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