Currents Summer 2024 (1) - Flipbook - Page 24
I did try, and failed, rather spectacularly, to go 2,000 miles from Pittsburgh to New Orleans in
2018. If you are one of those rare few people who have Facebook, I had a Facebook page
called Float of the Phoenix if you care to see pictures and see some video with top of the line
cinematography [the best you can get with an iPhone leaning against a cooler on a sinking
vessel.] There are cobwebbed posts on this site about the construction.
It was made from two pontoons made from 55 gallon drums, procured from a car wash
[they’d contained soap] and duck-taped into pontoon-shapes and fiberglassed. The
pontoons worked very very well, but I built and tested the boat here in New York, then had to
take it apart and transport it to Pittsburgh in a 20 foot Uhaul, and while I was in the process of
reconstructing it with my ship-mate Sam on a boat ramp at Silky’s Crows’ Nest Marina in
Sharpsburgh (just up the Allegheny from Pittsburgh Point), the area got hit with Hurricane
Florence, which totally flooded the entire region and valley such that for the next 45 days we
only saw one other pleasure boat on the river, the rest having been wrecked or taken out of
the river for the season. Towns were flooded up to their Main Streets. We had to jettison weight
after our center hull ruptured and pulled our boat under the water. We spent two weeks
marooned on Davis Island [including Sam’s 30th birthday] until someone from Pittsburgh
NORML saw us on Facebook, got a boat and crew, and pulled us against the current back into
the center of the river so we could proceed through the first Ohio River lock. Unfortunately our
fourth-hand motor died, and our second, second-hand motor also died, and after 45 days we
had only made it to Portsmouth, Ohio, at the confluence of the Scioto River, 365 out of 2,000
miles downstream, by mid-October, when it fell below freezing at night, the boat had no
propulsion, was sinking, and I was so broke I had to ask my mother to put $600 into my
checking account at KeyBank in Ravena so I could afford an Enterprise Rent-a-Car to drive
me, Sam, and some of our belongings back to New York. Later that winter I got a call from a
nice officer from the Shawneetown Marina who told me that my boat had completely sunk,
and a few months later, a woman Facebook-Messaged me that she had salvaged pieces of
my boat from the river bottom and it was now functioning as a faux-sunken boat flower bed
near the pond in her front yard.
That was October of 2018, and I was broke and, at 34, had to move back into my parent’s
basement. I called the manager at El Loco, the Mexican restaurant in Albany where I’d worked,
and got a shift the next day. A month and a half later I started working as Insurance Analyst
for the central staff of the New York State Assembly, where I had worked as an analyst 2007-12
and 2014-16. But I realized I needed to have some sort of passive income if I was going to try to
do a months’-long trip again. So I read some real estate books, worked three jobs, and bought
a two-family in Troy to subsidize my rent and to sublet when I was away.
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