a topography that rarely seems to inform their notions of where or who they are. If Manhattanites, other than the poor, want a river, they go to Maine, even New Jersey.
We went up past South Street Seaport, once a forest of masts and spars and home to packet ships owned by Captain Preserved Fish, then on we moved toward the high webbing of Roebling’s great bridge. Somewhere below, the A train clattered through the dark and grimed tube buried in the sludge to haul the human freightage into Brooklyn, the “broken land” of the Dutch. Beneath us life was actually occurring—words passed, bagels noshed, books read, sleep rattled—under our keel, under the river and fetid muck and cold rock, and no one down there imagining us gliding above. We passed the cul-de-sac of Wallabout Bay where, although the water was cleaner than a generation ago, a few suicides and murdered folk still washed up in that wet potter’s field, the cadavers chewed by eels.
The East River, local mariners allege, is one of but two in the world with a pair of mouths but no source. The truth is that it isn’t really a river at all, no matter what it looks like; it’s a strait only fourteen miles long, a narrow arm of the Atlantic that tidal currents sluice through to twist and torture the passage of small boats. But we were coming up it at its slackening, the flat hull of
Nikawa
sliding along as if the river were a farm pond, and then we went under the Brooklyn Bridge. Eighteen million people surrounding us, and we had the water almost to ourselves. I pulled the bow about, passed beneath to see the span again, and then turned us north once more. “What was that about?” Pilotis said, and I answered I’d waited a lifetime to see the bridge from underneath, an event I wasn’t likely to repeat. “I hope we’re not going to do the whole voyage twice,” my mate said. “By that route, the Pacific is sixteen thousand miles away.”
From the East River, the heaps of buildings of Manhattan seemed to leave little room for humanity, and the city looked strangely still, almost quiescent. Except for the trickling of yellow cabs along the perimeter, the place appeared empty. It didn’t manifest power or vibrance but merely bulk, all of it enhanced by a certain worn charm the river lends: its six bridges and its satisfying narrowness, especially at midtown where Roosevelt Island splits the channel to create an intimacy never achievable over on the Hudson. From the city came no stink of combustion engines and almost no sound carried against the soft easterly off the ocean as if early Sunday morning lay over the place. But it was Thursday and the streets, entombed in long spring shadows, seemed to suck in morning light and Atlantic air, and the whole island inhaled that sweetness crossing the water.
Because I’d long heard of its legendary potential for torment, we detoured a mile northeast just to pass through and experience the pinched bending of Hell Gate, where tidal eddies and standing waves and—once—rocks sent hundreds of ships to grief after the
Tyger
first came through from Long Island Sound in 1612. For us, the passage was an early test to build our assurance in
Nikawa
and our own capacity to handle even more difficult water ahead. Trying to ride the flood tide up the Hudson, we happened to reach Hell Gate at its tidal pausing, a near hydrological calm that leaves it comparatively quelled. Even so, the pilothouse of a small trawler ahead of us began to roll, and we stopped to watch it before we moved into the swirlings and heard the turmoil speak through our hull in low thumpings and sharp bangings.
Nikawa
yawed flatly but didn’t roll, and she shimmied forward through Hell Gate, and then we came about to take it the opposite direction before moving on past Astoria where once schoonermen lived under widow’s walks. Pilotis put aside the chart and said, “Our first Astoria is fifteen miles upriver from the Atlantic and our last is fifteen
We went up past South Street Seaport, once a forest of masts and spars and home to packet ships owned by Captain Preserved Fish, then on we moved toward the high webbing of Roebling’s great bridge. Somewhere below, the A train clattered through the dark and grimed tube buried in the sludge to haul the human freightage into Brooklyn, the “broken land” of the Dutch. Beneath us life was actually occurring—words passed, bagels noshed, books read, sleep rattled—under our keel, under the river and fetid muck and cold rock, and no one down there imagining us gliding above. We passed the cul-de-sac of Wallabout Bay where, although the water was cleaner than a generation ago, a few suicides and murdered folk still washed up in that wet potter’s field, the cadavers chewed by eels.
The East River, local mariners allege, is one of but two in the world with a pair of mouths but no source. The truth is that it isn’t really a river at all, no matter what it looks like; it’s a strait only fourteen miles long, a narrow arm of the Atlantic that tidal currents sluice through to twist and torture the passage of small boats. But we were coming up it at its slackening, the flat hull of
Nikawa
sliding along as if the river were a farm pond, and then we went under the Brooklyn Bridge. Eighteen million people surrounding us, and we had the water almost to ourselves. I pulled the bow about, passed beneath to see the span again, and then turned us north once more. “What was that about?” Pilotis said, and I answered I’d waited a lifetime to see the bridge from underneath, an event I wasn’t likely to repeat. “I hope we’re not going to do the whole voyage twice,” my mate said. “By that route, the Pacific is sixteen thousand miles away.”
From the East River, the heaps of buildings of Manhattan seemed to leave little room for humanity, and the city looked strangely still, almost quiescent. Except for the trickling of yellow cabs along the perimeter, the place appeared empty. It didn’t manifest power or vibrance but merely bulk, all of it enhanced by a certain worn charm the river lends: its six bridges and its satisfying narrowness, especially at midtown where Roosevelt Island splits the channel to create an intimacy never achievable over on the Hudson. From the city came no stink of combustion engines and almost no sound carried against the soft easterly off the ocean as if early Sunday morning lay over the place. But it was Thursday and the streets, entombed in long spring shadows, seemed to suck in morning light and Atlantic air, and the whole island inhaled that sweetness crossing the water.
Because I’d long heard of its legendary potential for torment, we detoured a mile northeast just to pass through and experience the pinched bending of Hell Gate, where tidal eddies and standing waves and—once—rocks sent hundreds of ships to grief after the
Tyger
first came through from Long Island Sound in 1612. For us, the passage was an early test to build our assurance in
Nikawa
and our own capacity to handle even more difficult water ahead. Trying to ride the flood tide up the Hudson, we happened to reach Hell Gate at its tidal pausing, a near hydrological calm that leaves it comparatively quelled. Even so, the pilothouse of a small trawler ahead of us began to roll, and we stopped to watch it before we moved into the swirlings and heard the turmoil speak through our hull in low thumpings and sharp bangings.
Nikawa
yawed flatly but didn’t roll, and she shimmied forward through Hell Gate, and then we came about to take it the opposite direction before moving on past Astoria where once schoonermen lived under widow’s walks. Pilotis put aside the chart and said, “Our first Astoria is fifteen miles upriver from the Atlantic and our last is fifteen
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