Ferry Tales

I have been commuting from Rockaway to Manhattan by ferry for the past few weeks, and between getting up early to catch the 7:45 in the morning and rushing downtown to get the 5:30 at night, lately I’ve been feeling as if I lived on this boat. My desk in Times Square sways back and forth like a ship's deck all day. The commute costs almost four times as much as the A train—the ferry is six dollars, plus another $2.25 for the subway from Wall Street to Times Square (not counting any celebratory beverages)—but to me it’s worth it, this twice-daily eyeful of New York Harbor.

Last week, the skipper of the American Princess announced two public meetings that might help New York Water Taxi get another boat put on the run—maybe one that left a little later in the morning and returned a little later at the end of the day. Last night, I went to the meeting at Kingsborough Community College, in Brooklyn. The college is at the eastern tip of a peninsula that forms the southern shore of Sheepshead Bay. Its major landmark, conspicuous from the water, is a rotunda, like an extra-thick silo, topped with a squat cone of green beams. It doubles as a lighthouse. The campus has its own tiny beach, Oriental Beach, an extension of Manhattan Beach, to the west. Manhattan Beach itself is a sweet little enclave, with a footbridge over Sheepshead Bay to Emmons Avenue, which is lined with restaurants and party boats for fishermen. I had been worried about where to park, but a guard at the campus gate told me I could park anywhere that wasn’t restricted.

The meeting was part of a Comprehensive Citywide Ferry Study to identify locations in Brooklyn that could be developed for ferry service. Although politicians from Rockaway were there to praise the ferry, and suggest that more runs be added and that passengers ought to be able to transfer for free to a bus or train, the agenda was soon hijacked by locals.

“Why would I pay six dollars on a freezing December morning when I can walk one block and get a train for two-twenty-five?” one woman said. (“You’re not riding a raft,” someone behind me muttered.) A woman from Coney Island seconded her, bragging that from Coney Island “we’ve got a one-seat ride.”

Mostly, locals were worried that a ferry landing in Manhattan Beach or Sheepshead Bay would mean more cars parked on their streets. “People who live in Manhattan Beach have a major problem with parking,” a well-groomed woman said. “This is a very small peninsula. . . . We have to preserve this wonderful community.”

Taking the other side, an administrator from Kingsborough said that his college is surrounded on three sides by water, and to get from Far Rockaway to Manhattan Beach by public transportation can take more than two hours. He joked that students not only get a diploma when they graduate but a certificate of survival. He would like a ferry landing at the college for students. The local ladies jumped all over him. “We have people with houses on the beach that need parking!” one woman exclaimed.

There were only a handful of people at the meeting who actually rode the ferry. A regular on the 5:30 Rockaway-bound who lives in Breezy Point had left his car that morning at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, where the ferry makes a stop, and driven from there to Manhattan Beach. “The schedule is always a problem,” he told the public. A ferry can’t run every fifteen minutes, like a subway. But he conceded that there does need to be “plenty of parking—that’s a key factor. If you don’t have it, you might as well forget it.” And he added, “If the trip is longer than an hour, it’s not worth it.”

The length of the trip was another hot-button issue. A young businessman acknowledged the need for alternatives to the Belt Parkway (which, incidentally, is sinking), but he said the ferry was too slow and that he was going to drive. A guy named Joe Hartigan, in cap, shorts, and sneakers, began his spiel by saying, “I’m not a big fan of Weiner,” meaning Anthony Weiner, the congressman who gets most of the credit for bringing ferry service to Rockaway (and who will never be mayor because of his funny name). Joe had hoped that a high-speed boat would be put on the route. He had made test runs in high-speed boats that got to Manhattan in twenty-eight minutes. He was outraged that New York Water Taxi had assigned a brand-new boat to the Yonkers run—Yonkers!—and given to Rockaway a boat that was used for whale-watching.

A well-spoken, well-prepared woman from Red Hook named Carolina Salguero was especially exercised about the fact that there was no ferry service between Red Hook and Governors Island. A ferry has been taking people from Manhattan to Governors Island for free, but they’ve done nothing for Red Hook, which is desperate for parks and ferry service and is right across Buttermilk Channel from Governors Island. When the moderator started to respond, Carolina said, “Enough already, Phoenicia, enough already.”

I found myself wanting to defend the ferry. The crew of the American Princess is friendly, and service has been remarkably reliable. Only once, in my experience, has it been late, and that was last Thursday, when Obama was in town to give his speech at the NAACP. In the afternoon, he flew from the downtown heliport to a fund-raiser for Governor Corzine in New Jersey, and the harbor was closed, so the boat could not come through. The man in front of me in line had a pinched nerve, and was extremely annoyed at Obama. But my feeling, as I waited, was that our lives were being touched by greatness—or at least delayed by greatness for twenty minutes.

More on the Bailout

Last fall at the marina, the Boss was awfully eager to take my boat out of the water, so I expected the same this year. I had enough gas in my tank to run the motor for about an hour and a half, and I was going to use it up and then hang up my oars for the season. But the Boss hasn’t yet shown any sign of taking boats out of the water, and conditions were perfect on Saturday: sunny and mild, with a light breeze and an incoming tide. So I put two gallons of gas in the tank and pointed the boat west to Sheepshead Bay.

I had been wanting to go to Sheepshead Bay, but it is a long trip—two hours out and one and a half hours back (with the tide). I amused myself on the way out by timing a measured mile that begins, according to my chart, at a green can west of the Marine Parkway Bridge and ends at the stack of the Neponsit old-age home, which Giuliani evicted all the old people from in the middle of the night several years ago so that the city could do something more profitable with the beachfront property. (It sits there vacant still; all he succeeded in doing was confusing a lot of old people, who had until then enjoyed a fine view of the nude beach at Riis Park.) I set my diver’s watch and covered the mile in about twelve or fifteen minutes—not a very precise measurement, but I couldn’t tell when I was abreast of the stack and, anyway, who cares?

I have at last discovered that, at the right speed and under the right conditions, you can let go of the tiller, and the boat will go by itself. That’s what boats do. It was good that I made that discovery, because I had a little bailing to do: water was seeping out of the sealed hollow seat beneath me, puddling at my feet, and I had to keep sponging it up and wringing out the sponge, something it is hard to do with just one hand.

Sheepshead Bay is where the party boats dock. The Golden Sunshine was there, and a few fishing boats came in while I was putting around. I did not tie up and go ashore, though there is a Loehmann's in Sheepshead Bay, and often there are fish for sale (off the boats, not at Loehmann's). I was tempted to try to buy some blackfish: my mechanic had told me, when I went to pick up my car, that blackfish was in season; he says it's delicious. I looked for the American Princess, thinking she might have been towed here for repairs, but I didn’t see her. There were flotillas of swans on the bay, and a lot of sailboats to steer clear of.

Sailing seems kind of pokey to me (as if with six horsepower I attained blistering speed), but I am beginning to get curious about it. How do they do it by themselves? How does a lone sailor manage? In Sheepshead Bay I saw an old guy sitting by himself in the middle of his sailboat with his arms outstretched, a line in each hand connected to a sheet at each end. (I believe “sheet” means sail and “line” means rope, and the sailor was sitting amidships.) It looks to me as if sailors have to be equally adept with both hands. On the way back, I decided to try sitting on the opposite side of my outboard, the port side, with my right hand on the tiller. Well, I am not equally adept: I couldn’t figure out which way to point the tiller to change course, and twisting the throttle to control the speed was out of the question. But while I was sitting over there I noticed that I had sprung a leak: water was spurting out of a previously plugged crack in the transom. Would this be, as they say in baseball, a season-ender? I wedged a towel against the crack, so as not to soak my back, and resumed bailing. Thus ended the experiment in ambidexterity.

***

This morning I took the ferry back to Manhattan to celebrate Columbus Day (Observed), leaving the Éclair in Rockaway, where it could take full advantage of the week's alternate-side suspensions. I took the bus to the ferry landing, and the bus driver drove like a maniac, so I got there early enough to recognize the American Princess heading up the bay from the Parachute Jump at Coney Island. So she was back. I asked one of the crew where they took the ferry to get its engine fixed. “We bring it to Freeport,” he said. “We have a good mechanic there, so that’s where we do it.” Some of the crew had worked on the catamaran that replaced the American Princess—passengers called it "the yellow boat"—but the guy whose name I think is Joe, who collects tickets and occasionally drives the boat and cleans it and serves drinks and welcomes people aboard and points out things like a World War II submarine tied up at Red Hook, says he stays with the boat all the time. He had to drive out to Freeport every day. I asked him what happened the day the engine blew. Nothing, he said. Then he explained, “This boat has three engines. You can run it on one, you can run it on two—we run it on three engines all the time.” The crew heard one of the engines failing, and they could have kept going (as I certainly would have) but they knew it would only get worse (which I would have learned the hard way). So they delivered their passengers safely to Rockaway and went to Freeport under their own power.

Vs of geese flew over the harbor. A low fog rimmed Manhattan. All that is left of a sign on the Brooklyn horizon is a backwards R.

Transmission

I drove out to Rockaway last Saturday, and before I left, Dee, who was in town for a concert, offered to move her car into my spot in the Sanctuary to hold it for me. It’s the nicest thing anyone has ever done to support my parking obsession! I told her she didn’t have to, though, because my plans were in a state of flux, and I would take my chances.

There was an article in last Saturday’s Times occasioned by the overlap between Rosh Hashana and Id al-Fitr, by a woman with the wonderful byline Jennifer 8. Lee, which contained some interesting history about alternate-side parking as well as the excellent suggestion that alternate-side parking rules be suspended for the entire thirty-day period of Ramadan and the information that the only people who don’t like it when alternate side is suspended are the bosses in the D.O.T. who have to reassign the guys who drive the street sweepers. Surely they can think of something else to clean.

Also it was reported in the Wave that the American Princess, the ferry to Rockaway, blew her engine last Wednesday during the morning run. New York Water Taxi is putting another boat on the route, probably one of the yellow-and-black checkered catamarans. I would have loved to be on the ferry to witness this little maritime disaster: to see how the crew handled it, who towed them, where they got towed to, etc. I miss the ferry and the crew and New York Harbor. I even miss the faux waterfalls.

The New York Waterfalls, by the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, are getting cut off next Monday, October 13. I found myself recommending them to some visitors from Italy, so I guess I like them, though I came to them from real waterfalls in Flores (below), worthy of King Kong. I am not ashamed to say that I am a waterfall snob, but I am also a big fan of plumbing.

In Rockaway, I intended to go on a historic bungalow tour that I saw a notice for in the Wave several weeks ago. (There was a typo in the headline: “BUNGLOW.” I couldn’t decide whether to pronounce it Bung Low or Bun Glow.) But then I remembered that I lived in a “bunglow” and I ought to be ON the historic bungalow tour. So instead of reporting on the historic bungalows, I offer this link to a cut of the documentary “The Bungalows of the Rockaways,” by Jennifer Callahan and Elizabeth Logan Harris. The filmmakers hope it will be shown on PBS in its entirety when it is done.

My first stop in Rockaway was the mechanic’s. I finally had to admit that the smell I’d been smelling, all across Ohio, of burning rubber or petroleum or something bad cooking, was coming from me and not from the guys spreading blacktop or making asphalt repairs who appeared by coincidence, for me to blame it on, everywhere I drove. It started on the L.I.E. a few weeks ago, when I felt a jolt—something pretty solid hit the right rear tire—but the car kept going and seemed to be all right. I told the mechanic, and I tried to describe the smell, but said I didn't know if there was any connection. He came out to the car, sniffed, and said, “I can smell it.” He opened the hood, and then crouched down under the car. (All the pens fell out of his pocket.) “What did you hit?” he asked. I don’t know, but apparently there were parts of it stuck under there (it wasn’t an animal).

While he was under the car, I thought to tell him that when I started up the car that morning, and pressed the accelerator to pick up speed, the engine didn’t respond. I had to pump it a few times. “That’s the transmission, isn’t it?” I said, and he said yes, he could see the leak. He couldn’t do anything about it right away (mechanics like to get out of the garage early on Saturday), but I gave him the spare key and said I’d park the car in the lot later. “Write this down!" he yelled to someone inside. "Tranny leak.”

Three, Two …

If all goes as planned, tonight I will use the second-last trip on my forty-trip ferry ticket to get back to Rockaway, on the Friday of Labor Day Weekend. Of course, there’s nothing to prevent me from buying another ticket and extending the season—in fact, I fully intend to. But it’s hard not to feel a little wistful as the last week of August and my ferry trips run out.

I have been able to take the ferry home in the evening this summer more often than I would have thought possible. On Tuesday, instead of going straight home from the ferry, I drove to my favorite beach. A bride and groom were running along the sand, being filmed. They probably were not a real bride and groom but models. (I forget that Rockaway is often used as a location. Last week on the boardwalk I walked past a rack of ratty-looking clothes and shoes and asked the guy who was tending them, “A sale?” “No,” he said. “A shoot.” Then he laughed. Lucky I didn’t automatically start riffling through the wardrobe department, looking for bargains.) Farther down the beach, someone had built a little fire out of driftwood. At the surf line two men were talking, and one of them, I could not help but notice, was completely nude. Now, I don’t care if someone wants to disrobe in public, but where am I supposed to rest my eyes? A fisherman had just pulled an undersized fish out of the water, so there was that. He threw it back.

On Wednesday morning, the captain of the ferry boat arrived carrying four shopping bags from Dunkin’ Donuts. I held off on my granola bars in case he was going to distribute doughnuts to the passengers, but they must have been for the crew. I transferred to the East River boat and walked to work from East Thirty-fourth, up streets I've never been on before. (Did you know there is a little park at Thirty-ninth and Tunnel Exit Street?) I haven’t warmed to the crew or passengers on the East River boat. On the Rockaway ferry, you recognize people from day to day, notice, say, when someone’s hair is getting longer, or who drinks the most Budweiser. (Not me.) If there’s a couple you haven’t seen before and they are both wearing yellow, they are most likely tourists, probably from Florida.

Wednesday night, I finally got to sit on one of the best seats, at the rear of the top deck, when one of the regulars—a man who dresses in conservative suits and splashy ties and wears black Reeboks and his hair in a ponytail—told a guy who had been sitting there smoking a cigarette that smoking was prohibited (“This is public transportation”) and, after an obligatory show of defiance, the guy moved. It was a beautiful evening. There were three crazy kayakers paddling up the Verrazano Narrows, and several sailboats in the bay. Curving into Riis Landing, the ferry left a graceful arc spreading in the water. I thought I heard a cell phone ring, but it rang and rang, and nobody answered, and finally I realized it was bagpipes: a man was standing behind a pickup truck in back of the old Coast Guard station practicing. And so that night we were piped ashore.

On the Water

What’s that sound? I asked myself at five o’clock this morning, while puttering around in the kitchen, getting my coffee started and the cats’ breakfast. Plock. Plock. It was rain. And it was solving all my problems.

I had to take my car in for inspection this morning, so instead of leaving the car at the ferry-dock parking lot last night and worrying about it today, I took an unaccustomed route home: the No. 4 train (I had wound up on the Upper East Side) to Nevins, in Brooklyn, where I switched to the No. 2 train (I lost my balance getting up before the train had stopped and tripped sideways in about eighteen tiny thudding steps, like a nightmare ballerina, holding onto a furled umbrella and a full backpack, and threatening for the length of half a subway car to slam into a straphanger and send us both crashing onto the floor before I could reach a pole to hang onto—it was quite a performance) to Flatbush, where I caught the Q35 bus, which has a stop at the Rockaway end of the Marine Parkway Bridge, a short walk from the ferry dock. I intended this morning to stick the bike in the trunk and drive to the mechanic’s, leaving the car with a note (Inspection, Oil Change, Transmission Fluid, Headlight—Fix or Retape?) and riding my bike the rest of the way to the ferry. But I don’t ride the bike in the rain (no brakes), and it made my morning so much easier to skip watering the garden, drive to the garage, and take the bus to the ferry.

I had to stop for gas, though, because I was afraid I might not have enough gas to make it to the mechanic's, or, if I did, that the car would run out of gas during its emissions test. My bright idea of holding down the price of gas by filling up when I still have half a tank has, obviously, failed, but, up against it at the pump this morning, I had another brainstorm: fill it just to half full. This kept the cost to twenty dollars. At Bulloch’s (the mechanic’s), gas is always extra expensive, because Bulloch's is an independent gas station. When I left my keys in the office, I noticed that the owner had been altering his gas-price signs with hand-drawn 5s, as in $5.19 per gallon.

The bus came right away, and though it made every stop, it still got me to the ferry dock fifteen minutes early. I have a new favorite seat on the morning ferry: the picnic table on the upper deck nearest the stern, facing front. I can set my coffee cup down and spread open a book. It’s like having a desk on a porch in New York Harbor: utterly luxurious. There were lots of container ships in the harbor—UASC, MOL, Baltic Monarch—and an excursion boat called the Golden Sunshine. When it’s socked in like this, things in the foreground stick out more. The sign at the new IKEA store in Brooklyn looked huge. On Governors Island, there was a parked car with “NUTS” painted on its side in big white letters. The air smelled like fish and yeast.

Today was a good day for the waterfalls—the four artificial waterfalls by the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson—because there was not much wind, and the water dropped straight down over the scaffoldings. Some mornings they have not been turned on yet. The New York Waterfalls are growing on me. I think I read that the artist said the idea is to be able to see all four of them at once. As we approach Manhattan, three of them are off to the right—one pouring off the BQE in Red Hook, one under the Brooklyn tower of the Brooklyn Bridge, one on the Lower East Side—and one over my left shoulder, at Governors Island.

There was a couple on the ferry today, tourists, who were killed taking pictures of everything: the Marine Parkway Bridge, Coney Island, the Verrazano, the skyline of Jersey City. As they are, so once was I. As we approached the pier at Wall Street, they were so busy taking pictures of the skyline that they missed the waterfalls completely.