Rolling
on the River
Harry
Jameson had just about had it. As a young man, he developed a love
for drawing and drafting, and considered a career at it, until he
visited the IBM campus and saw “a huge room with a bunch of
guys, wearing coke-bottle glasses, hunched over their desks under
ourescent lights. That’s when I said, ‘the heck with
this, I’m gonna be a forest ranger!’” Still, graduation
found him on a minimum wage production line where the lack of opportunity
started to make the Navy look good. He joined up, and became a ight
simulator instructor. From there, it was the life of a eld engineer,
on the road a lot, no control over where he could live, both feet
in the corporate world.
Harry found himself thinking a lot about better times, as a child
in the Catskills, swimming, shing, tubing down the Esopus Creek,
where he and some friends would pack a picnic, and spend entire
days on the water. On one particularly stressful day, something
nally clicked in his head: Wouldn’t it be great to go back
to get off the rat track, return to the Catskills, and start his
own business, providing the tubing experience he had loved as a
kid to others, and make a decent living at it?
As it turned out, the Esopus proved to be an ideal location. As
part of the water system that supplies the greater New York City
area, it links the Schoharie Reservoir with the Ashokan. Four times
a year, a portal is opened, and the water level is raised up to
a foot higher, bringing the water temperature down, and contributing
to turbidity. While contributing to the maintenance of the aquatic
habitat, it also creates a 4-mile stretch on both sides of Phoenicia
ideal for tubing enthusiasts.
CONTINUE....
|
