Down
the Susquehanna to the Chesapeake
by Jack Brubaker
The Course
This part of the Susquehanna is about as wide as a living room and it meanders like the course of a parcheesi game. Trees broken by spring floods had toppled into or across the river. We hacked our way through or lifted our craft over.
—Ralph Gray on canoeing the first miles of the Susquehanna, National Geographic Magazine, July 1950
When Dame’s Rocket lights up the Susquehanna riverbank
with vibrant lavender and pale pink flowers in late May,
scores of canoeists paddle furiously out of Lake Otsego
and down the narrow river course. Professional and would-be
Olympic racers from the eastern United States and Canada
are competing in one- and two-person races in the longest
single-day flat-water race in the world—seventy miles
from Cooperstown to Bainbridge.
Begun in 1963, the General Clinton Canoe Regatta commemorates the commander who sent his boats speeding downriver during the Revolution. ("I suppose regatta participants wouldn’t think it was such a gala affair if they realized that Clinton was really going down through here just to destroy the Indians’ food and hope they starved to death for the winter," says Joe Homburger. Homburger watches the race each year from his front yard on the river at Phoenix Mills.)
The event is called a regatta rather than a race because it includes a wild variety of additional events that lure mostly local amateur paddlers of all ages. Participants stage preliminary sprint and relay and fun races at various points between Cooperstown and Bainbridge throughout Memorial Day weekend. The seventy-mile events, also known as the world championship flat-water endurance races, are held on Memorial Day itself. They begin early in the morning, usually before fog has lifted from Lake Otsego. How long they last depends on the level of the river water as well as on the quality of the paddling.
The first several miles of the Susquehanna, before it joins Oaks Creek, provide the most challenging stage of the race. Canoeists can take an hour or more to reach Phoenix Mills. Wood often fills the narrow Susquehanna, which local residents refer to as "the crick." River sponsors chainsaw a path downstream before the race begins, but sufficient obstacles remain. If water is low, canoes bump into rocks and tires on the river bottom. If it is really low, they scrape over islands of gravel.5
After that stretch, and especially below Milford, the river
deepens and widens and, for the remainder of the journey,
provides one of the most scenic racing waterways in the
country. The Susquehanna’s beauty (along with a desire
to attract tourists) inspired a Bainbridge insurance agent,
Charles Hickley, to begin these races and the Bainbridge
Chamber of Commerce to continue them.
Thousands of spectators stand on Susquehanna bridges and
sit on lawn chairs along the banks to watch the pro paddlers
glide powerfully along the course. One of the racers leading
the two-man professional division more often than not has
been Serge Corbin of St. Boniface, Quebec. Corbin has entered
more than half of the races and has won every time. Thanks
to better-trained athletes and lighter equipment, winning
times dropped from 11 hours and 45 minutes in 1963 to a
record 6 hours, 34 minutes in 1990.
The professional racers never pause in their precision paddling, except to portage small dams at Cooperstown, Goodyear Lake, and Oneonta, before skimming across the finish line at General Clinton Park at Bainbridge. Here they join amateur paddlers from earlier races in a carnival atmosphere that draws crowds from the rural region. While kids enjoy rides and games, their parents may tour the regatta’s tiny museum to admire the clunky seventy-two-pound canoe in which Al Camp and Jim Root won the 1969 race. By comparison, Serge Corbin’s latest graphite canoe weighs twenty pounds.
Aside from regatta participants, Joe Homburger sees about twenty people paddling and dragging their canoes along his stretch of river each summer. Some enjoy a day’s adventure and some hope to canoe the entire Susquehanna. Lake Otsego’s outlet has been the starting point for some extraordinary recreations.
The most celebrated expedition ever to travel the length of the river passed Phoenix Mills long before Homburger began monitoring traffic. Ralph Gray and five other paddlers used three heavy wood-and-canvas canoes to descend the Susquehanna from Cooperstown at a comparatively leisurely pace in the summer of 1949. Newspapers covered the tour as it progressed and tens of thousands of people turned out to cheer the paddlers all the way to the Chesapeake. With unusually low July water and without an advance crew to cut away trees, the group faltered below the Cooperstown dam. The men walked their canoes over the worst driftwood piles and stony shoals. Even so, the rough riverbed shredded the bottom of one canoe. "As Susque or Hanna [two of the canoes] scraped on gravel bars and rocks," Gray reported later in the National Geographic, "dairy cows grazing in adjacent pastures looked up in wonderment. Or was it quiet scorn? We began to feel a little foolish before our constant gallery of well-bred herds."
An Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay group tugged its canoes through the debris out of Cooperstown and paddled on to Binghamton in June 1996. Each spring since 1990, canoeists participating in the Alliance’s Susquehanna Sojourn have taken a week’s vacation to cover a substantial stretch of water. At night they hear local experts discuss the river’s ecology and history. Sojourner groups have paddled the entire Susquehanna and its major tributaries without encountering a stretch as ragged as those first few miles below Cooperstown.
Not everyone uses a paddle to propel himself down the Susquehanna. Russ Chaffee, a thirty-nine-year-old teacher from Sayre, Pennsylvania, swam all 444 miles in twenty-eight days during the summer of 1966. The only person ever to swim the length of the Susquehanna (as well as the length of all the Finger Lakes), Chaffee said he wanted to emphasize swimming’s recreational values. Upon arriving at the Chesapeake Bay, he reported, "I was struck with the wideness of the Susquehanna. Of all the rivers I have seen in the world, few can match it in this area."
The wide river caused no problem more dangerous than the juvenile Susquehanna. Just downstream from Otsego’s outlet, the current swept Chaffee beneath an undercut bank. He held his breath for what seemed like several minutes until he could break away. Then he continued swimming and occasionally climbing over accumulated debris in the narrow channel, on his way to the broader river and the bay.
Cooperstown
Cooperstown’s location as the first community at the headwaters of the Susquehanna River gives it a special downstream responsibility to those towns who drink from the river, and ultimately to the fishermen who make their living from the Chesapeake Bay that it feeds, 400 miles south of Main Street.
—Michael Whaling, environmental activist, in a letter to The Freeman’s Journal, Cooperstown, April 1999
William Cooper, father of the novelist, founded Cooperstown
in 1787. Because he thought of the Susquehanna as the area’s
primary conduit to downstream markets, he laid out his village
on a north–south axis on the west side of the river.
He built his house near the river but facing the lake, and
first settlers called the town Foot of the Lake as well
as Cooperstown.
Perhaps inspired by General Clinton’s Revolutionary example, Cooper proposed to build a dam across the Susquehanna’s outlet to build up a head of water to help float boats downstream during low flows. He collected the money needed to construct these works, but the New York legislature refused to pass an enabling law, fearing that Pennsylvania communities would benefit at the expense of New York cities. Since then, Cooperstown has focused more on the lake than on the river, and many of its most substantial buildings face the former.
More than a century after the founder’s river plan
foundered, the Cooperstown Water Company built its concrete
dam across the Susquehanna just downriver from the outlet.
This blockage raised Lake Otsego and helped provide a steady
supply of drinking water for the village’s 3,000 residents.
The company employed water wheels and gravity to move this
higher water along an aqueduct running through town. About
1960, Cooperstown abandoned water power and began to pump
drinking water through the town with electricity. The town
chlorinates lake water, runs it through a rapid sand filter
to remove solids and chemicals, and chlorinates it again
before pumping it to drinkers.
If Cooperstown’s water distribution system has not
required the dam to help distribute drinking water for more
than four decades, why not remove the impediment instead
of forcing everyone canoeing out of the lake to portage
almost immediately?
"The purpose of the dam," maintains a state water quality management plan drawn up in 1976, "is to regulate the level of Otsego Lake within certain limits in order to maintain the recreational potential of the lake." If the lake fell to its natural level, Sunken Island, at Otsego’s northern end, would no longer be entirely underwater, and boating in that area could be hazardous. Moreover, the lake’s shoreline would change, in some places radically, disturbing property owners and boaters.
The artificial water level causes unnecessary erosion to unstable shorelines and damage to the lake’s ecology, says Bill Harman at the Biological Field Station. "If the lake was back to its original level, we’d be in a lot better shape," he claims. "However, if you lower it, you’ve got all of the silt which has washed out and has built up a new wave-washed terrace three feet higher than the original. That’s all going to be re-eroded again. I wish it wasn’t up, but now we’ve got a situation where we effectively can’t drop it."
The town will not remove the dam for another essential reason: it regulates the flow of the first miles of the Susquehanna. River flow must be steady to flush Cooperstown’s treated sewage fast enough to keep the nutrient-enriched water from wiping out aquatic life. The village’s sewage treatment plant sits about a mile downriver from the dam, just behind Cooperstown High School. The system provides primary and secondary treatment of solid and liquid waste. In the late 1980s, at the insistence of the Department of Environmental Conservation, Cooperstown added $1 million worth of rotating biological contractors to squeeze out remaining toxins, primarily ammonia. After chlorination, a pipe carries the waste water another quarter of a mile downstream before dumping it into the river that runs out of Cooperstown’s basin of drinking water.
As a member of Cooperstown’s water and sewer boards, Dr. Ted Peters has monitored the water coming and going for several decades. A retired research scientist at Cooperstown’s Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital, Peters says that "new" water from the lake is better than Perrier (because it does not have benzene in it). He says Cooperstown’s "used" water is no better or worse than any other community’s waste.
"This is where the water is best on the Susquehanna," agrees David Sanford, chairman of the village water board.
"It’s all downhill from here," adds John Mitchell, chairman of the Otsego Lake Watershed Council.
page 6©2002 The Penn State University