One Noah's Ark, Two Red Cabooses, and a Biplane in Among the Trees

ARKVILLE — As Halloween is now past, and thoughts turn to Christmas, I find myself humming the Frederic Austin song that he composed from the old 18th century classic, Twelve Days of Christmas. But here in the Western Catskills, the first three gifts are: One Noah's Ark, Two Red Cabooses, and a Biplane in among the trees. Let's drill down to the story behind these gifts to Arkville.

Ted Johnson begins the story, "30 years ago, a customer walked into the office at Titan Drilling and said, 'I just came over from Roxbury way, and there's some crazy guy out there with an airplane on a rollback taking up two lanes, no cars with flashing lights.' We all looked at each other and said, 'That's Dad.' We didn't know he was going to get it, had no idea that he'd bought it. He didn't tell anybody. He likes his surprises. As soon as the customer said, 'I had to follow it for miles, and I finally got around it... '" they knew it was their father Lynn Johnson.  Soon they saw their father, Lynn Johnson pull into Titan Drilling's yard with a biplane on the back of one of the company trucks. 

Let's pause for a moment and consider why they were not surprised. It takes a special kind to drill into the Catskill "soil." I've always said, "two rocks for every dirt" is an outrageous undercount. Today,  generations of Johnsons are born to it. Lynn and his father started the family business. It didn't begin with drilling. There is a photograph of Lynn's dad Wilbur or Wilber, in the office with a small steam engine on a small wagon. Roxbury Run Development was starting up in the 1960s. Lynn was digging septic systems with his father, Wilbur, who had built a homemade backhoe on a converted truck. The two of them built any equipment they needed until the day Lynn decided to expand the business into drilling. He contracted with Engersol Rand to buy a drill rig and have a company man come out and work with him for two weeks, to teach him to drill. On the second day, Lynn got fed up and angry with Engersol's man, and he fired him. "He said, ' you don't know what you're doing,'"  He figured out the rest by himself. That was a generation of doers. As with many in the farm communities in his day, he had nine years of school, then went to work, went into the Navy for four years, then back to work. "He was the smartest man I knew," Ted says with pride. Lynn made his mark on Arkville.

One Noah's Ark. One day, Lynn bought a boat on Long Island. As with the airplane, he loaded it on a truck and headed North West. The boat was over width and "scrubbed the toll booths. They started giving us a hard time. A cop couldn't measure the whole boat, so he told him [Lynn] to hold the tape measure on one side, so as soon as he [the officer] went around the transom of the boat, and he could not see him, my father just stretched his arm out... and gave like an extra four feet. When the cop came back over, he [Lynn} put the end of the tape [back on the gunnel] and the cop said, 'Boy! It looks wider than that!' So my father said, 'I must have been too far over on one side.'" His father mounted the boat on a Chevy chassis and added a steering wheel for the Arkville Parade. They'd load it up with animals and kids, and it would be "Noah's Ark." 

Two Red Cabooses. Lynn Johnson was instrumental in helping get the Arkville Railroad started. He brought two cabooses up by truck, on two occasions, as the tracks no longer ran unbroken down to Kingston.  They were over height, over width. He removed the "truck" (the wheels and undercarriage) and put them on a roll back, and drove them up to Arkville by road. "It was so tall, when we were going under the bridges, it's peeling the tar paper off the roofs [of the cabooses.] So, we're CB [radioing] up to the truck in front, 'stay to the left lane,' cause that was the highest. And, we then come to the toll booth again, coming out of Kingston. And they have the 'feelers' for the over height, and we bent those back. The guy looks at Dad and says, 'Just get this thing out of here, I don't want to know...' He did some amazing things."

 And a biplane in among the trees. The plane was built by a fellow in Middleburgh. Ted does not remember who. Lynn heard that the fellow's daughter believed her father was going to try and fly the thing, so she ratted him out to the FAA, then put the plane up for sale. As I photographed it, I realized she did the right thing. She saved her father's life. The skin of the plane is pool liner held in place by blue nails. If he had started the biplane's very real aviational engine, the nails would have shaken out in a shower about the plane. The wings had no aerodynamic shape, but if he had managed to get off the ground with enough lift from the elevators, the thing would be in a state of deconstruction. Lynn very sensibly put the biplane up on the ridge overlooking County Road 38. It looks skyward as if taking off and under it sits a sign, "Boulder Airport." 

Ted is making his mark on Titan Drilling. He started working the family business at six years old, making a quarter an hour. When he got work boots, he got a quarter an hour raise,   They still drill water wells for property owners outside the townships' systems, and drill wells for the township's water system as well. These days they do some geothermal drilling. Geothermal cooling and heating takes advantage of the fact that ten feet below the ground frost depth, the earth is a constant between 50°F and 55F° all year. They now expanded into plumbing and heating. Septic pumping, porta-johns for weddings, festivals, and worksites. For wedding temporary conveniences, they have the trailer johns. They are large. Users go up a few steps and find the lavatories are air conditioned. They are much nicer than the small porta potties.  Last year, Ted bought Brookside Hardware. Brookside was going up for auction, and Ted is concerned with keeping the community intact. "We didn't need to take on more, but the town needed it." 

If you are within a hundred miles of Arkville, need a well, a geothermal system, a septic system, or temporary outhouses luxury or utilitarian... remember a firm which has made a mark on Arkville and has stories to tell. https://www.titanwelldrilling.com/