As a journalist you learn to work around your interview subjects’ schedules. But this may have been the first time I had to wait for one of them to disembark from her canoe.
Z Behl, an artist who divides her time between Claverack, New York and New York City, wasn’t being difficult. The canoe plays a role in the story. Z simply admitted that she finds it challenging to conduct interviews, and even worse to keep the social media beast satisfied, while afloat.
Z and fellow paddler Kim Moloney are conducting a five-week long canoe performance, known as Mule’s Passage, along the Erie Canal.
They started in Waterford, New York on Aug. 7 and will end their journey in Buffalo on Sept. 5.
They’re traveling upstream, meeting people (mostly when they dock), and drawing the community into their project. For example, in Waterford they received a chorale sendoff from singers along Peebles Bridge. It included a sing-along of Erie Canal folk songs. Their odyssey’s sponsors include the New York State Canal Corporation and the Erie Canal Museum.
As virtuous as their mission sounds - its themes include the invisible labor of women, the canal’s role in the Underground Railroad, and the romance and decline of American industry - I was frankly more interested in the trip’s challenging logistics.
Z and Kim were speaking to me over the phone from a Stewart’s in Little Falls, New York after spending the night of Aug. 14 camping there. Stewart’s, it turns out, serves as something of a life preserver - pun only partially intended - from the elements.
“It’s the only place we can get our eggs and the ice coffee is delicious,” Z explained.
I wasn’t the first person to ask the artists why they were paddling the entire 350 mile length of the canal upstream.
Z said it was a metaphor for the current state of the world. “You can never get where you want to go,” Z explained. Kim added, “We feel like we’re paddling upstream, for sure.”
Navigating a 19-foot canoe acquired in the recesses of Facebook Marketplace and filled with food and equipment - both camping and art-related - sounded reasonably precarious. And that was even before the artist decorated its bow with a donkey head. That’s an homage to the mules that once pulled barges along the canal in the days before motors.
Negotiating the canal’s 36 locks also sounded iffy to me. Z explained how Lock 17 in Little Falls, which they’d passed through the previous day, worked: they entered the lock alongside a much larger vessel; a giant metal door lowered behind them; the lock filled with six million gallons of water, rising 43 feet, while they clung to a rope on its side.
“We started saving little frogs that got trapped in the locks,” Z reported.
Among the grace notes of their voyage have been the friendships they’ve struck up with the lock tenders along their route. They’ve allowed the team to camp on their lawns and Z to refrigerate her medicine. She’s recovering from a serious bout of Lyme disease.
The artist is no stranger to monumental efforts. Her “Thatcher the Snatcher,” a 25-foot sculpture made with Kim from salvaged metal was part of a group show in a Claverack field in 2024. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia commissioned several large works from Z including a 300-foot long snake two years earlier. And the Brooklyn Army Terminal just featured her huge oyster shells made of pigmented concrete and embedded steel.
And if the women don’t already have their hands full, Mule’s Passage marked the debut of a canoe, not the one they were riding, that Z made of Venetian glass for Guy Park Manor in Amsterdam, New York. It recalled the flooding of that historic site by Hurricane Irene in 2011. The paddlers climbed out of their canoe on Aug. 10 and into their art opening with local TV news cameras rolling.
It’s unlikely that Z could have pulled off the performance - did I mention they also published a Mule’s Passage broadsheet about the show and printed collectible souvenir “Canal Bucks” - without the assistance of the power in the back of the canoe. Kim Moloney, when she’s not working on Z’s sculptures, is one of the few female members of the Iron Workers Union. Her welding career has taken her, among other places, to the heights of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.
The women also have what they describe as a third paddler. It’s an electric solar charging outboard motor supplied by Bixpy, one of the trip’s sponsors. It does for canoeing what E-bikes do for climbing hills. I’m tempted to buy one myself even though it’s probably overkill for the rowboat on our one-third-acre pond.
The journey ends at Canalside Buffalo, the city’s waterfront district, on Saturday, Sept. 5. But the show is hardly over. To commemorate the trip, the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse will devote an exhibition to Mule’s Passage in April 2027.
Ralph Gardner Junior is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found in the Berkshire Eagle and on Substack.
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