More than 40 years after the sloop Clearwater was launched by a famous folk singer on a mission to clean up the Hudson River, a nearly $1 million restoration project set to take years is under way to replace rotting wood.
“When you build a boat out of wood, you get a number of good years where everything is clear and fresh and strong,” said Samantha Heyman, one of two captains of the Clearwater. “But pretty much from the get-go, you’re always watching, you’re always being diligent and using all the resources at your disposal. All wood rots eventually.”
Pete Seeger of Fishkill, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame who in January 2009 performed with Bruce Springsteen during President Barack Obama’s inauguration celebration, founded the environmental organization Hudson Sloop Clearwater four decades ago.
Seeger believed building a replica of the boats that were critical to the Hudson Valley economy of the 1700s and 1800s would bring people to the shores of the polluted waterway, and inspire them to work at restoring its health.
For 40 years, the sloop Clearwater has been the icon of the environmental organization Clearwater, and, for many in the Hudson Valley, a symbol of the American environmental movement.
The Clearwater annually hosts educational sails for thousands of schoolchildren throughout the Hudson Valley and has, over its lifetime, brought more than a half-million students out onto the historic waterway.
But 40 years of sailing has taken its toll on the wooden boat, which was built in 1969 for a little less than $300,000. The Clearwater costs about $375,000 annually to operate.
“The rot will travel from a bad piece of wood to a good piece of wood,” Heyman said. “And then a big project is going to become an enormous project.”
Heyman said the rotting wood on the famous boat, which can often be spotted from the Mid-Hudson Bridge in Poughkeepsie, has never posed a danger to those on board.
“Is she going to sink? No,” Heyman said before November, when the boat was hauled from the Hudson River. “Is it safe to come sailing on board? Yes. Are these repairs necessary? Yes. All the work we’re doing is preventive maintenance, so five to 10 years from now, it’s not in a dire need. Right now, we’re staying on top of it.”
The Clearwater is currently on a barge at Lynch’s Marina in Saugerties, where the work is taking place.
Funding from the state Office of Parks and Historic Preservation and federal money secured by Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-Hurley — a total of about $300,000 — is being used to pay for part of the work. Also, a benefit concert for Clearwater, held at Madison Square Garden in May, raised $700,000 that was used to create an endowment, which will also help pay for the repairs.
The reason for the work is simple — wood rots after prolonged exposure to water. This was not a problem in the 1700s and 1800s because sloops used for commerce back then were designed to last only from 10 to 25 years.
“It was a lot cheaper just to beach the vessel, take all the good parts and build a new one,” said Nicholas Rogers, the other captain of Clearwater, a 106-foot-long boat built primarily of oak that has a 108-foot mast and 3,000-square-foot main sail.
But the Clearwater has been on the water for 40 years because building a new boat, Rogers said, “would be much too expensive” and “it doesn’t go with our motto of sustainability.”
In addition to routine maintenance at Lynch’s Marina during the winter, a handful of carpenters and Rondout Woodworking of Saugerties, the project manager, are replacing roughly 30 planks and 30 frames in the front section of the boat, which is called the bow.
The planks are comparable to skin on the human body; the frames are comparable to ribs. Rotting wood, along with some ice damage, prompted the removal of the planks and the frames.
To put this project into perspective, consider that in the winter of 2009 only six planks were replaced and, Rogers said, “that’s a little more than typical.”
The Clearwater has roughly 200 hull planks in the bow, with close to 1,000 total.
This phase of the restoration is scheduled for completion in early March, with the boat set to return to the water several weeks later.
Clearwater officials had thought the boat’s stem, the forward extension of the keel, might also need replacing because of rot. But the stem was found to be in good shape after the planks were removed.
Routine maintenance and aggressive fundraising are scheduled for the winter of 2010-11, with the replacement of the stern post and the horn timber — Heyman described these as the rear extension of the keel — and the replacement of the centerboard housing, called the “trunk,” during the winter of 2011-12.
The centerboard of the Clearwater is similar to the centerboard of a small sailboat, which stabilizes the vessel, Heyman said. The keel is akin to a human backbone.
All of this restoration work is due to rotting wood, with white oak replacing red oak.
This work follows the replacement of the entire deck, over the past six years, because of rot and wear and tear.
Heyman said the full extent of the restoration project won’t be known until certain portions of the boat are removed, exposing other sections, much like what happened with the stem.
But she said the nearly $1 million price tag is unlikely to change. And when the entire job is completed, from 50 percent to 60 percent of the Clearwater will have been replaced.
Asked how this nuts-and-bolts work fits into Clearwater’s historic legacy of cleaning up the Hudson River, Heyman said, “I think the idea of taking care of something, husbandry, of using your craft to diligently care for something over a very long period of time, it definitely takes you away from that sort of ‘use-and-throw-out’ kind of world. You get something good and you take pains to care for it, looking both in the short term and the long term.”
About sloop Clearwater
• The sloop Clearwater was launched May 17, 1969, in South Bristol, Maine, and is a replica of the Dutch sloops of the 18th and 19th centuries. These cargo vessels were specially designed for the variable winds, currents and depths of the Hudson. Folk singer Pete Seeger of Fishkill, who founded the Clearwater environmental organization and was the driving force behind construction of Clearwater the boat, said sloops centuries ago carried “bricks to build New York, lumber, hay for New York’s horses, and in their early days, they carried passengers; Alexander Hamilton wrote some of the Federalist Papers sailing on a sloop to Poughkeepsie.”
• Length: 106 feet
• Total sail area: 4,305 square feet
• Mast length: 108 feet
• More than a half-million children have participated in Clearwater’s educational sails.
• On May 3, 2009, Bruce Springsteen, Dave Matthews, Kris Kristofferson and dozens of other big-name musicians performed at Madison Square Garden during a benefit concert for Clearwater, which also celebrated Seeger’s 90th birthday.
That concert raised $700,000, which was used to start an endowment for Clearwater, the environmental organization Seeger founded. That endowment will help to pay for repairs to the Clearwater, the boat.
But the confusion usually fades. As choruses of improvised commentary pour forth from Mr. Rollins’s tenor saxophone, the melody mutates and dissonant phrases creep in, as do the well-placed squeak and squawk, sounding to some listeners like references to wildlife’s plight amid the changing climate.
“The improvisations are more expressive of my more serious nature on the global warming issue,” Mr. Rollins said. “The depths of your thoughts emerge in ways that are difficult to put into words. The subconscious takes over.”
Mr. Rollins has been mining his subconscious for most of his 79 years, challenging musical convention so profoundly that Gunther Schuller, the composer and former president of the New England Conservatory, once called him the central figure in the development of thematic improvisation.
But, Mr. Schuller said in an interview this month, musical innovation in isolation has never been enough for Mr. Rollins. “He’s such a deep thinker that just playing and playing and playing is not something that man is ever going to do. He’s going to question, he’s going to ask, ‘O.K., here’s where I am now. What’s next?’ ”
Next on Mr. Rollins’s agenda — after a performance at the Kennedy Center in Washington — is a rare benefit, for the Clearwater environmental organization, on Dec. 6 at the Tarrytown Music Hall.
The benefit is very much in keeping with Mr. Rollins’s interest in issues like the environment, said the bassist Bob Cranshaw, who for 50 years has provided a grounding for Mr. Rollins’s improvisatory flights.
“He might not want to preach about it,” said Mr. Cranshaw, who played on the “Global Warming” album in 1998 and will be part of Mr. Rollins’s sextet at the benefit. “But it’s part of his thing. He’s in tune with it.”
While Mr. Rollins is famously reluctant to prepare set lists in advance, he did acknowledge that he was likely to play “Global Warming” at the benefit.
That was one indication that he would keep the theme of the concert in mind — and, in the process, help bring jazz further into the environmental arena, said Jeff Rumpf, Clearwater’s executive director.
“Jazz added to our repertory gives us a tremendous amount of opportunity to reach new audiences, new people,” he said. “And somebody like Sonny Rollins, a living legend, gives Clearwater a whole other palette.”
In fact, Mr. Rollins has been using jazz to speak out about social concerns at least since 1958, when he released “Freedom Suite.” The album’s groundbreaking instrumentation — a “pianoless” trio consisting of saxophone, bass and drums — liberated the music from harmonic strictures and provided an apt metaphor for what was, as Mr. Rollins made clear at the time, the broader issue: liberation of racial minorities.
At times, Mr. Rollins’s concerns have focused on jazz itself and what he said was its marginalization in the larger culture — a factor, he said, that accounted for the lack of invitations he receives to play benefits. Mr. Rollins said he tried to elevate the status of jazz 25 years ago when he began restricting his performances to the concert stage and gave up “the smoke-filled, cash-register-banging night clubs.”
With jazz increasingly found on the concert stage, Mr. Rollins can perhaps claim some success in those efforts — success for which he shares credit with his wife, Lucille, a partner in his struggles who died in 2004. Living alone in the Columbia County farmhouse they shared for 40 years, he said, sometimes gets lonely. “But I have a lot of fans all over the world. So I take a lot of pleasure in that.”
The recognition Mr. Rollins received just this month attests to the public’s perception of his continuing status as a pathfinder. Downbeat magazine announced that Mr. Rollins had won its readers’ poll as top jazz artist and tenor saxophonist. And while on a European tour, he was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art. All of which has only increased calls for him to commemorate his 80th birthday next year.
But any commemoration, like the Clearwater benefit, seems unlikely to include a straightforward rendering of past material. When it comes to his playing, Mr. Rollins said, he has no intention of looking back without addressing the issues of the day, musical and otherwise.
“It’s a living, breathing art form,” Mr. Rollins said of jazz. “It’s about today, really.”
Still Singing
I saw Pete Seeger Sunday night, alive as you and me. They threw a birthday concert for him at Madison Square Garden. John Seeger, age 95, said from the stage that he expected his 90-year-old younger brother to make 100, which seems reasonable. Standing there, banjo off his shoulder, head thrown back, Pete looked eternal, in that pose so engraved in American memory it should be on a coin.
More than 40 artists, including John Mellencamp, Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez and Bruce Springsteen, joined in a stage-clogging sing-along. When its four-plus hours are edited down to highlights, from “This Land Is Your Land” to “Goodnight, Irene,” it will be a PBS special made in pledge-week heaven.
I wonder, though, how many of the angry moments will survive.
Will we hear the Native American musicians pleading for support in their battle with Peabody Energy? Peabody is a giant strip-mining company that has been at the center of lawsuits by Southwestern tribes over drinking water and income from mineral rights.
Will we hear the praise for the Clean Water Act of 1972, or the acid remark from one of the Indians: “Ever since that man by the name of Hudson went up that river, it’s gone to hell.”
The evening was, after all, a benefit for Clearwater, the name of an organization and a boat, both built by Mr. Seeger, that have fought for decades to rescue the Hudson River from life as an industrial sewer. The job isn’t done. Remember PCBs? General Electric dumped tons of them in the river. The company is about ready to dredge them out, but for now they are still there, seeping downriver and into fish.
That’s one hot issue. But issues and leftist anger were mostly confined to the first half of the evening. Under a sweet, heavy nostalgia glaze, the show summoned but never lingered on bygone days when folk singing was considered both relevant and dangerous.
Mr. Seeger has walked the walk for so long that he has outwalked most everybody who would ever want to beat him up, throw bricks at him or denounce him as a Red.
He’s “outlasted the bastards,” Bruce Springsteen said. But others will outlast him, and it will be up to a new generation to write and sing songs to fight power with truth. Will they? Or will they close their eyes and sway to “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” forgetting the part of folk singing that was never sweet for its own sake?
“Behind Pete’s somewhat benign, grandfatherly facade,” Mr. Springsteen said, lies a “nasty optimism,” a great way to describe the steel-willed Seeger method, the geniality that others mistake for softness.
Mr. Seeger is “a stealth dagger through the heart of our country’s illusions about itself,” Mr. Springsteen said, getting it exactly right.
