Ashore

West Branch, NY
N 43.365641 W 075.497510

We're ashore this week doing baby sitting duties in West Branch. My son John and his wife Cheryl are on a getaway at a resort in the Poconos this week. Libby and I are sitting for our grandkids, Nick, Sara, Katelyn, and Victoria. Needless to say, the duty is a pleasurable one for us.

On Sunday we motored up the Oswego River from Phoenix, through Fulton to Minetta. As we waited for the lock at Fulton I was reminded of yet another story from my youth.

In my college years, I worked summers as an exterminator. That job led me into many memorable circumstances as you might imagine. Among the best ones were the annual fumigation of the Nestle chocolate factory in Fulton.

Nestle ordered fumigation of their facilities on a regular basis as a preventative measure. In Fulton, the factory consisted of two large, 3 story buildings. We always scheduled the fumigation to be done over a 3 day weekend. My job was to help with the preparation.

Fumigation is a simple process. One fills up a confined area with poison gas. We used methyl bromide gas. It is deadly to any organism that breaths or absorbs air. The key to fumigation is to make the space as air tight as possible. If it isn't air tight, then the gas leaks out before doing its job. Down south, they use enormous blue tarps to cover an entire building to fumigate for termites. 40 years ago in Syracuse we had no such tarps.

Several days before the job I would begin preparing strips of butcher paper smeared with Vaseline (petroleum jelly.) We used those strips to seal off the leaks around windows, doors, ventilators, cracks or any place where air might enter or leave the building. The Vaseline strips had the advantage of instantly sticking to almost any surface without much fuss. It also had the advantage that the paper strips would fall off in a few days and biodegrade. After a few months, the vaseline stains would wash away with the weather. Thus, little or no clean up was needed.

At the site we had a crew of about 6. The first day we would seal the building and place the gas cylinders. Needless to say, nobody other than us exterminators was allowed near the buildings for the 3 day period. That mean that we had free run of the factory. There were bins of chocolate and stuff everywhere and nobody around to tell us not to eat it. I'm not a big fan of chocolate but I did love the huge chucks of pure cocoa butter they had in bins. That stuff was delicious. We worked hard that day, and climbed a lot of ladders to seal everything. There was no OSHA law back then to hinder us.

At the end of the day when everything was sealed, we prepared to release the gas. In big buildings like this and elaborate operation was needed to be safe. We had to open two cylinders of gas per floor, three floors per building, and two buildings. That means a lot of walking and climbing stairs, from cylinder to cylinder in an environment quickly filling with methyl bromide. Even though we wore gas masks, the gas could be absorbed through the skin. Thus, if someone fell or got hurt, the rest of us would have to notice his absence almost immediately and launch a rescue to get him out of the building.

To do that we rehearsed the release over and over again. We counted our steps and measured the seconds past. We noted when and where we would see a glimpse of the other workers as we passed them in a stair well for example. That way, if somebody missed one of those rendezvous, we could immediately call "Hey Rube" I thought it was like the Mission Impossible programs on TV and it was exciting.

Anyhow, back to sailing. We continued past Fulton to the tiny Hamlet of Minetto. Minetto is a delightful tiny little town, with only 815 male and 848 female residents (according to the Internet). Despite its small size and modest means, Minetto provides a free dock with electricity, water, bathrooms and showers for transient boaters. The dockmaster, Kent, is 83 years old and he does a wonderful job and provides interesting story telling. There are many communities along the New York Canal system that provide outstanding hospitality for boaters, but Minetto has to stand in the forefront of these.