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My River Chronicles: Rediscovering the Work that Built America; A Personal and Historical Journey, by Jessica DuLong
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When journalist Jessica DuLong ditched her dotcom desk job to ply the waters of the Hudson River as engineer of a rusty antique fireboat, she found a taste of home in a maritime community that was quickly disappearing. In this heartfelt and marvelously illuminating book, she weaves together stories of life on the water with tales from Hudson Valley history.
Published to coincide with the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s historic voyage up the river that bears his name, My River Chronicles is a journey with an extraordinary guide. Once Jessica DuLong started toiling in the engine room of Fireboat John J. Harvey, she never looked back. The more time she spent with the boat’s finely crafted machinery, the more she wondered what America is losing in our shift away from hands-on work. Her service pumping water to fight blazes at Ground Zero following the September 11, 2001 attacks reinforced in her mind the importance of blue-collar skills. Masterfully grounding her own experiences with narratives from the river’s rich history, she introduces us to seventeenth-century explorers, nineteenth-century canal builders, and a cast of present-day characters—including a salvage diver hunting sunken tugboats, a foundryman who casts iron in the old way, and a distiller who crafts bourbon from local corn—that reminds us how colorful and dynamic the Hudson continues to be. What emerges is a celebration of labor (and leisure) from a woman who straddles blue-collar and white-collar worlds and turns a phrase as deftly as she does a wrench.
- Sales Rank: #846894 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Free Press
- Published on: 2009-09-08
- Released on: 2009-09-08
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.10" w x 6.00" l, 1.07 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 320 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
"An unexpected portrayal of America in the decline of industry, delivered from the unique vantage point of the Hudson River. . . . [A]n eye-opening picture of what America has been . . . and what it is becoming. . . . Powerful." - Kirkus, starred review
"Jessica DuLong’s elegantly written My River Chronicles brings the past of the Hudson River into the vivid present and carries forward the craft of literary non-fiction with grace and energy." - Gay Talese, author of A Writer’s Life and Unto the Sons
"She details her often exhilarating experiences in her very fine and gutsy book. Ms. DuLong is a confident and sensual writer, as perceptive about small matters on a boat as was Anthony Bourdain, in Kitchen Confidential, about everyday events in a professional kitchen. . . . Readers will feel their own little yelps of glee all over My River Chronicles." - The New York Times ArtsBeat blog
"The engine room is, in DuLong’s opinion, a tribute to an era of craftsmanship that is very nearly extinct." - The New Yorker
"Smart, captivating prose . . . [Readers] will love this unusual mix of history, adventure, feminism and blue-collar know-how. Highly recommended." - Library Journal
"When Jessica DuLong describes her work in the engine room of the John J. Harvey, you can practically feel the throb of the boat’s mighty diesels. This is someone who has paid some dues, and it shows in the details. Her view through a narrow portal at the water line opens into a bigger picture of the Hudson River, the economy of New York, and the dignity of work - the kind of work that is genuinely useful. My River Chronicles is an account of what made this country thrive, and might yet again: men and women who aren’t content to stand around with their hands in their pockets. The book reeks of penetrating oil, which may be just what is needed to get our economy, and our culture, moving again." - Matthew B. Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work
"In rich and captivating prose, Jessica DuLong kindly invites the rest of us on the journey of her lifetime: from a dot-com job to the fabled waters of the Hudson River, where she became a fireboat engineer. This is an unusual and fascinating book." - Jon Meacham, author of American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House and Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship
"As both a writer and an engineer, she’s relentlessly, gratifyingly curious, and her fine, richly detailed prose holds an appeal regardless of your level of interest in heritage histories and engine mechanics. . . . [T]he whole book is so layered and compelling that the intensity of 9/11 doesn’t overpower the slower, more meditative sections. . . . DuLong’s passion for her craft is contagious, making My River Chronicles one of the most moving, unusual books I’ve read in a long time." - Bookslut
"Jessica DuLong is a lucky woman. She stumbled into an obscure world- the overheated engine room of an old fireboat - and discovered that she belonged there. Readers are lucky, too, because she has managed to translate her love affair with the water into a finely written and fascinating story about a lost American way of life." - Stefan Fatsis, author of Word Freak and A Few Seconds of Panic
"If you’ve ever wondered what we’re missing by sitting at computers in cubicles all day, follow Jessica DuLong when she loses her desk job and embarks on this unlikely but fantastic voyage. Deeply original, riveting to read, and soul-bearingly honest, My River Chronicles is a surprisingly infectious romance about a young woman falling in love with a muscle-y old boat. As DuLong learns to navigate her way through a man’s world of tools and engines, and across the swirling currents of a temperamental river, her book also becomes a love letter to a nation. In tune with the challenges of our times, DuLong reminds us of the skills and dedication that built America, and inspires us to renew ourselves once again." - Trevor Corson, author of The Story of Sushi and The Secret Life of Lobsters
About the Author
Jessica DuLong, a United States Coast Guard–licensed Merchant Marine Officer, is one of the world’s only female fireboat engineers. She is also a journalist whose work has appeared in Newsweek International, Rolling Stone, Psychology Today, Parenting, and numerous other publications. This is her first book. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
PROLOGUE
IF THE CANARIES found it in their hearts to sing, no one could hear them. One minute they were flitting about the treetops in Germany’s Harz Mountains. The next they had been netted and stowed in the belly of the steamship Muenchen. Each bird perched in its own tiny wooden cage that hung side by side with six other birds in six other cages, all swinging from a single wooden rod. Then another rod with seven cages, and another, and another. Seven thousand caged birds swayed in the cargo hold as the ship’s bow cut through the squally sea.
Twelve storm-tossed nights after the birds—involuntary immigrants—had departed Bremen, Germany, they arrived in New York harbor, two days behind schedule. On Tuesday, February 11, 1930, as the ship approached Manhattan’s Pier 42, no one knew that the cargo in nearby Hold Six had already begun to smolder. The 499 sacks of potash, forty drums of shellac, 386 rolls of newsprint, 234 bales of peat moss, along with steel and aluminum, all stored side by side, were a recipe for a mighty conflagration.
Two hours after the steamship’s arrival on Manhattan’s West Side, four longshoremen stood in Hold Six, unloading bags of potash— fertilizer bound for New England farms. They heard a crackling noise, and a streak of blue flame shot up from the sacks at their feet. They stamped on the smoldering bags trying to smother the flames, but soon thick black smoke filled the hold. The men, coughing and choking, scrambled for safety as huge tongues of flame began to lick out above the deck. The blaze spread quickly to other cargo holds, and within minutes fire consumed the whole rear of the ship.
An electric pulse from the New York City Fire Department’s dispatch office snapped through telegraph wires to ring a bell in the station house at Pier 53, fourteen city blocks away. A specific sequence of clangs summoned Engine Company 86 to the scene. Firefighters readied hoses and engineers stoked the boilers of fireboat Thomas Willett, and pilot John Harvey hurried to the helm. Surely he could already smell the burning. With more than two decades’ experience on the job, Harvey took the wheel, signaled the engine room, and the Willett steamed south at full throttle.
Meanwhile, the Muenchen’s crew, with the aid of longshoremen, hooked up a hose from the pier and raised it on a boom to reach the upper deck. But the hose line was frozen. Soon the billowing smoke was so dense that the men standing near the hatch were scarcely visible to spectators gathering on the pier, a crowd that by day’s end would number ten thousand. None of the firefighters rushing to the scene, by land or by river, knew then what Hold Six contained.
At 11:30 a.m., fireboat Willett rounded up on the south side of the pier. The whole stern of the Muenchen was aflame. Directed by the battalion chief, Harvey brought the boat as close to the fire as he could. He had no idea he was sidling up to a bomb.
© 2009 Jessica DuLong
Chapter One
NAMESAKE
SEVENTY-TWO YEARS later, nothing more than a pegboard forest of disintegrated pilings remains of Pier 42, where pilot John Harvey met his fate. Today is Memorial Day 2002, and we, the crew of retired New York City fireboat John J. Harvey, are preparing to pay homage to our boat’s namesake.
Pilot Bob Lenney, who steered this vessel for more than twenty years while the boat still served the FDNY Marine Division, noses her slender bow toward the stubby remnants of the covered pier—a grid of timbers, their rotting tips sticking out just a foot or so above the water’s surface. Chief engineer Tim Ivory swings a leg over the side, clutching a small bouquet of all-white flowers that he has duct-taped to the end of a broken broom handle. A crowd gathers on the bow as he leans out over the water, holding on with just one leg, to stab the jagged handle-end into the top of one of the crumbling piles.
I know all this only by way of hearsay and pictures. From where I stand belowdecks, my fingers curled around the smooth brass levers that power the propellers in response to Bob’s commands, I can’t watch it unfold. Because I, fireboat Harvey’s engineer, stand in the engine room the whole time we’re under way, this ceremony, like all the rest, is to me just another series of telegraph orders: Slow Ahead on the starboard side; Slow Astern on the port.
Between shifts of the levers, I steal glimpses of the harbor through the portholes—round windows just above the river’s rippled surface. Above decks, pilots use the Manhattan skyline for their points of reference, to know where they are or where they’re headed. Here, belowdecks, I use low-lying landmarks: the white tents where fast ferries load, the numinous blue lights in South Cove, the new concrete poured to straighten Pier 53 (which firefighters call the Tiltin’ Hilton) where, on February 11, 1930, FDNY Marine Division pilot John Harvey signaled his deck crew to drop lines and shot south at the helm of fireboat Thomas Willett on his final run.
Nearly three-quarters of a century after his death, as the fireboat named in his honor leaves the pegboard forest, I hold my own private memorial service, issuing a silent prayer. It’s something of a thank-you and something of a nod of acknowledgment: We remember. I whisper about the work we’ve put into preserving the boat over the past year. I tell him about rewiring shorted-out circuits. About our efforts to dis- and reassemble failing, rusty pump parts. About coating her steel surfaces with protective epoxy paints. All this, I explain, is done, in part, to pay homage to him—the man who lives on through this fireboat.
As the boat pushes through the water, I stand at my post, sweating. Though I can’t hear the slosh of bilgewater over the growl of the engines, I can watch it through gaps in the diamond-plate floor. Like every steel vessel, this boat fights a constant, silent battle with the salt water that buoys her. The river seeps through little openings in her seventy-one-year-old skin. It trickles, etching burnt orange stains into the thick white paint that coats the riveted hull. Sometimes the boat rolls and sways and a splash of green overwhelms my porthole view. That’s when I remember that I’m underwater. Less than a half-inch of steel plate separates me from the river.
Only after we’ve pulled away can I make out, through a porthole, a small speck of white where the flowers stand tall in the May sunshine. As the speck disappears against the muted gray of the concrete bulkhead at the water’s edge, the significance of the ceremony fades into the everyday rhythms of the machinery.
When I moved to New York City from San Francisco in 2000, I had never heard of a fireboat. Now I have found a home in the engine room of a boat born four decades before I was. During long stretches at the controls, when the drone of engines drowns out the mental clutter of my landside life, I wonder about the men stationed here before me. Did they feel left out of the action down here in the cellar? Did they chain-smoke, read, play cards to pass the time while they waited for the pilot’s next command? Career guys, most of them. Firefighters, with an engineering bent. Irish and Italian. Their uncles, fathers, and brothers—firefighters before them—had laid down the paving stones that marked their nepotistic path.
There were no paving stones for me. My father is a car mechanic in Massachusetts. I’m here only by blissful accident, having stumbled aboard in February 2001—a naive young upstart with a university degree. A bubble-salaried dot-commer. A striving, big-city editor. A woman.
When I look at the black-and-white photographs of old-time crews—ranks of short-haired men, some young, shirtless, and grinning; others defiant; a few older ones, impassive, their stern expressions suggesting what a handful the younger ones can be—I want to know them. But I’m not sure the feeling would be mutual. These men probably never imagined that someone like me would be running their boat, their engines. All my compulsive investigations began as an attempt to bridge that gap. The distance between us is what first fueled my fascination with the fireboat’s history—a fascination that escalated to obsession, then swelled to encompass the history of the Hudson River, whose industries helped forge the nation. I’ve since fallen in love with workboats, with engineering, with the Hudson.
As American society continues to become more virtual, less hands-on, I’m a salmon swimming upstream. I have come to view the transformation of our country through a Hudson River lens. More and more, my days are defined by physical work—shifting levers, turning wrenches, welding steel. As I work and research, a picture begins to form of the history of American industry mapped through personal landmarks. As the United States faces economic upheaval that challenges us to rethink who we want to be as a nation, I have discovered that it pays to take stock of who we have been: a country of innovators and doers, of people who make things, of workers who toil, sweat, and labor with their hands.
My own, personal compulsion to understand the country’s progression was born out of the ashes of the steamship Muenchen. Maybe not being able to witness, firsthand, the leaving of the flowers is what drives me to dig up the details.
Classic Fireboats in Action 1900-1950 isn’t available on DVD, so when it arrives in a brown padded envelope, I have to pull the TV down from a shelf in the closet instead of just sliding a disc into my laptop. Perched in front of the twelve-by-eight-inch screen that I’ve wired to an old VCR, I rewind the tape over and over again, playing back the same scenes, dredging for details. I slow it down, letting the video advance ...
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
An incredibly powerful book
By H. Davidson
I just finished reading MY RIVER CHRONICLES by Jessica DuLong. It is simply the best nonfiction book I've read in a very long time. The author had me hooked with her prologue, in which she describes the heroic death of John J. Harvey, the fireboat pilot for whom the historic boat DuLong serves on is named. But after that, the author brilliantly intertwines her own story of discovering a love for manual labor with four centuries of Hudson River history. There are sad parts of the story -- the John J. Harvey evacuated many stranded survivors from lower Manhattan on 9/11 -- and joyous ones, like DuLong's developing crush on a tugboat, which she learns to pilot. MY RIVER CHRONICLES is a passionate and inspiring read, told in a unique voice that makes you feel you're along for the ride.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Viewing the Hudson Plain
By M. Lucey Bowen
Jessica DuLong believes in hands-on work, and she infuses her book with language and thinking that reflect that. From her experiences within the working fireboat John Harvey, up and down the river from Manhattan the day after on 9/11 to cement plants near Albany, we learn what is happening at water level. To those experiences she adds inspired pieces of the river's history, and a profound sense of how our Romantic, Modern, or Post-Industrial mindsets effect the decisions we make about the land and water. If you are a Hudson River lover, you have to read this book!
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Powerful, Personal and Timely
By erin k
My River Chronicles is a beautifully written love letter to the Hudson River and good honest work, the kind we (largely) have forgotten how to do in America. A unique protagonist and uniquely sensitive observer, Jessica DuLong shares her journey from dotcom office worker to fireboat engineer - an unlikely and compelling career path driven by nothing more than a willingness to follow her heart towards meaningful work. In an era when her fellow Gen-Xers don't know how to make anything that doesn't require a laptop, DuLong dives head first into a kind of work that is hands-on, physical and anything but virtual. Along the way, she discovers the history of American industry and forges a deeper connection with her own family. This memoir is a meaty, satisfying read, and in light of the recent economic crisis, a powerful reminder of the kind of labor and laborers - men, and now, women - who built this country by hand.
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