I could have called this “Mystery near Minekill”, or  “kōan in the Catskill Sea,” and those alternate titles will require some explaining.

You’re probably thinking . . .  how is this different.  It’s a partly disassembled truckable tug surrounded by woods and other construction equipment.  What’s the mystery or the kōan about this?  And what/where is the Catskill Sea?

Here are some answers.  First, mystery, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.  The beholder aka the photographer here was driving north on NY 30, not quite 150 miles from the sixth boro, about 30 miles as the birds fly inland from Catskill NY.  The surroundings aka the Schoharie Valley are always quite magical, especially to me, given my interest in the Palatine settlement of the area over 300 years ago.  A few days before I’d said jokingly to a friend that I was hoping to play some nine-pins with old-fashioned, nefarious Dutch ghosts up in the Catskills.  I’d already stopped at John Burroughs’ [an original vagabond] Woodchuck Lodge and Mine Kill Falls and was heading for the Gilboa fossils of the oldest trees in the world and after that to Howe Caverns, a place not on the face of the earth.  I hope you’re picking up on the vibe of this context, this blogpost.

That’s when I turned right off NY 30 N and downhill on 990 V and had not yet seen the waters of Schoharie Creek or Gilboa Reservoir.  Right there was a fenced off parking lot on NYC Road, and in that lot was this hull of a tugboat.  

Yup, not what I was expecting, neither NYC Road nor a tugboat.

So I have a few answers like . .  . it was NOT a NYS Canals tugboat, as I initially suspected.  The  small tugboat called V002, was being disassembled after working for a few years in that area for a company called Southland Holdings out of Midland TX.   Southland owns American Bridge,  and Gilboa Dam is involved in NYPA power production for the electric grid and clean water impoundment for NYC’s drinking water supply.  I’ll put link after the post this time.

Job complete?  A truckable tug can be broken down and the parts loaded onto a road trailer for transport to the next job.  No, I did not trespass to get these photos, and the crew was very professional, of course.

The effect of spotting the tugboat near the dam was sort of like old Rip van Winkle heading into the woods and playing nine-pin with those ghosts of Henry Hudson’s crew as conjured up by Washington Irving.

All photos, any errors, any anything else, WVD.

Some links in no deliberate order:

Gilboa fossils and Dam

Catskill Sea and Delta

Southland Holdings

John Burroughs’ Woodchuck Lodge

The vagabonds

Palatines of the Schoharie Valley

New York City water supply

Bellfire Farm

kōan

It’s almost summer.  I hope you can see something different and be pleasantly astounded by something.  We were fortunate and went camping here, a spot I highly recommend.