(Host) With the opening of the new Lake Champlain Bridge yesterday,
commentator and Lake Champlain Maritime Museum co-director Adam Kane
has been thinking about a recent underwater experience in the shadow of
the old bridge.
(Kane) On October 16, 2009: those accustomed to a routine crossing of
Lake Champlain at the Champlain Bridge between Addison, Vermont and Crown
Point, New York had their lives turned upside down. The 80-year-old span was closed at 1:35,
without warning. A routine inspection
found the supporting piers in an extreme state of deterioration.
For those who weren’t there, it’s hard to describe the great
pressure and hardship of those early hectic days. Family
members had to choose between
living on opposite sides of the lake, or putting up with unbearably long
commutes. Area businesses faced certain closure. Farmers were separated
from their fields
and animals. There were emotional public meetings; and a furious effort
by many people to
help, somehow.
As an archaeologist for the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum,
I led underwater surveys up and down the lake trying to determine if a new
bridge or ferry crossing would impact any of Lake Champlain’s valuable,
historic shipwrecks.
An immediate,
temporary ferry for commuters at the site of the old bridge was critically
important, but the sole option for its landing site on the New York side was of
great concern: it was square on top of what the Maritime Museum had reported in
1990 was almost certainly a small wooden boat underneath a pile of stones. Given the historic forts in the area, the
boat was likely a colonial era bateau.
Bateaus were the workhorse boats of Britain and France in the eighteenth
century wilderness surrounding Lake Champlain. They were commonly hidden from
adversaries for the winter by sinking them to the lake bottom with a heavy load
of rocks.
Safe underneath the lake’s ice
for the winter, they would be raised and put back into service in the spring. The thought of a 250 year old bateau, which
would constitute a rare and important historic site, lying in the middle of the
rapidly encroaching ferry landing was distressing, to say the least.
Our urgent dive to explore the cold and murky
November lake
water took one hour, but it seemed like much longer as we pulled away
the
stones, dreading confirmation of the historic remains.
But when the rock
pile was dismantled it was clear: it contained only bricks, concrete
blocks, and
timbers which could have been purchased at Home Depot. The rocks had been hiding not a bateau but
the bottom of a burned ice shanty. I’m an
archaeologist, and I had never been so happy not to find an archaeological site.
On December 28, the bridge was demolished in a spectacular
explosion hidden behind a curtain of snow.
Residents grieved at the destruction of what had been a trusted friend,
a gateway to home, and a scenic landmark.
The view from the top of the span had been a daily confirmation that we
live in one of the most beautiful, historic places in the world.
Over the last two years commuters on the temporary ferry
have been able to witness the new bridge go up beam by beam. Unbeknownst to
them, and happily for one archaeologist, they were able to bear such close
witness to the new bridge’s construction because the ferry docks not over an
historic shipwreck but at the former location of an ice shanty.