ABOARD THE JOHN J. HARVEY IN NEW YORK HARBOR — Up on deck, a group of inner-city kids — most have never before been on the Hudson River — squeal in delight, getting drenched by water.
It’s not raining. But for a few moments aboard this antique New York City fireboat, it feels as if it is — if rain were salty.
Down in the engine room, Jessica DuLong, a former dot-com executive, is at the controls.
With a few tough turns of large wheels, she opens four centrifugal pumps. There’s a rumble, a huge whoosh of air and 16,000 gallons of river water per minute are sent skyward through fire cannons up on deck.
DuLong’s job as engineer of a fireboat that’s been turned into a floating museum (fireboat.org) inspired her to write My River Chronicles: Rediscovering America on the Hudson (Free Press, $26, released this week).
Later, back at the dock, DuLong, 36, who also freelances for magazines (from Rolling Stone to Today’s Machining World), calls her book “a perfect merger of my two worlds: my white-collar life as a writer and my blue-collar life as a fireboat engineer.”
In the boat’s overheated, oily and rusty bowels, she can’t see the river, only the sky through portholes above her head. She wears industrial-strength ear protectors.
“It’s a weird job,” she says, “but satisfying. It uses your brains and your muscles.”
In a “bell boat” like the Harvey, the pilot can’t control the propellers. He signals to the engine room using a pointer on a “telegraph,” connected by what looks like a bicycle chain.
Below, the engineer controls the speed and direction by shifting handles on two brass dials marked Slow, Half and Full in two directions — Ahead and Astern.
At 5-foot-5, DuLong stands on a crate at a control panel designed for taller men. She’s the first woman to run the boat’s engines in its 78-year history.
In 1999, a group of old-boat enthusiasts bought it, saved it from salvage and slowly restored it.
Two years later, DuLong, a Stanford University graduate who was a director of content and website development at an online start-up in New York, joined a volunteer workday on the fireboat.
It changed her life. Two months later, she lost her job as the dot-com boom went bust, but soon found a new home on the Harvey.
Being “the only girl in a boys’ world” has its ups and downs, she says. “Everybody knows your name,” but some “assume I must be somebody’s girlfriend,” not part of the crew.
She also describes her growing appreciation for working with her hands and “the elegance of objects made with the goal of longevity and an eye for craft.”
The book also revisits 9/11, when the fireboat returned to service, providing water to rescue workers.
DuLong loves working in two worlds but worries about the fireboat’s future: “They don’t make boats like this anymore. But they also don’t know how to repair them.”
