Ship’s Log 9/25/2010

Baby Dee came out on the boat with me last Saturday, the day before she played Joe’s Pub with Little Annie. There were several inches of water in the boat (there’d been a hurricane and a tornado since I last saw it), so I took off my sandals, climbed in, and bailed. Dee watched. So did some guys who had been sitting outside the office/trailer. For some reason, it amuses people to watch a lady bail out a boat. One of the guys was big, with a beat-up nose; his sidekick was small and dark. “You know, they sell electric pumps,” the big guy said. He told me, in all seriousness, that once I was out on the bay, with the motor going, I could pull out “that plug next to the motor” and the motor would draw out the rest of the water. What? That plug is the main thing standing between me and certain disaster! This is not a method of bailing I'm going to be testing anytime soon.

Before setting off across Jamaica Bay, I went to see the Boss, to find out what I owed him for getting the outboard fixed and also to ask exactly what had needed fixing. He was resting on the dock, with a tall glass of either iced tea or Captain Morgan’s on-the-rocks. "A hundred," he said. “My price.” (I think that means they would have charged me more.) I was ready to pay up, but he said I should wait till the end of the season, “when we’ll need the money to keep us in kibble for the winter.” He said that the pump had melted, and then he teased me about trying to go boating in sand. I’ve actually never run aground—one of the few mistakes I have NOT made in my boating career—but the awful truth is that I forgot to check for the cooling jet of water before setting off on this year's maiden voyage. When I realized it, I knew I should have turned the motor off instantly and rowed back to the marina, but I didn't. It was a relief to know that I had not completely cooked the motor, only lightly sauteed it.

Dee and I needed a destination, and I always like to go someplace I’ve never been before. I was thinking of Howard Beach. The guy with the beat-up nose recommended Vetro, a new place associated with Russo's-on-the-Bay, the big catering hall on Cross Bay Boulevard. "It's on the left as soon as you enter the channel," he said. "They got new docks and a lot of tables outside." We motored across the bay, between Broad Channel and J.F.K., concentrating on spotting the buoys and not getting swamped by the wakes of bigger boats. On the trestle bridge, an A train from Manhattan passed an A train from Far Rockaway: a pas de deux chevaux de fer. There was a good breeze, so it was a little choppy and we both got splashed. The tide was low.

We passed Bergen Basin (which you can't enter anymore, because of Homeland Security) and Hawtree Basin (which, at high tide, takes you all the way to the terminus of the Air Train at Howard Beach, through what looks like "Deliverance" country) and made a wide turn into the channel at Howard Beach. I would have liked to go up to the end of the channel, very slowly, like Cleopatra on the Nile, but the first mate wanted to go to the first place she saw, Vetro, which was exactly where our informant had said it would be. There was hardly anyone there, but whoever was there was certainly watching as I blundered around, shifting from forward to reverse and finally cutting the motor and using the oar to get the back half of the boat closer to the dock while Dee clung to a cleat from the prow. Such seamanship!

Dee had steak and wine, I had grilled octopus and beer, and the waiter admired my boat, which he called a dinghy. Yachts passed as we dined. On the return voyage, the motor started knocking in an alarming way, and I don't know what that was about. But I slowed down until it was under control, and we reached home without incident.

"Now we will return to the Isle of Manhattan," Dee said. So we went back through Howard Beach by car, and there it was again, this time on our right, our new landmark: Vetro. All in all, it was an eccentric itinerary.


(Photo pirated from Vetro's Web site.)

Kidnapped

[From the archives]

Ship’s Log, September 6, 2003

Splendid day. Started out at high tide (around 4 P.M.) after bailing half a foot of water (and one dead fish) out of the boat. I had a vague plan to go around Broad Channel counterclockwise. Pete suggested an alternative route: up through the Wildlife Refuge and back via the airport channel. Angela, his wife, was in New England. An old friend of Pete’s named Brian had turned up at the marina, and before I left, Pete said that Brian wanted to take him and Angela out to dinner to celebrate their birthdays, which were within a day of each other, and he (Pete) was entitled to a substitute, so if I got back in time . . . It was a kind of round-about invitation to dinner. When I finally figured out what he was saying, I didn’t have the heart to tell Pete that I had already made dinner plans. I had accepted an invitation for seven o’clock from friends of a friend. The friend himself couldn’t make it, but I was stuck.

(I was struggling with whether or not I was part of a couple. I had met this friend—I’ll call him Dick—on the beach in late July, after an e-mail correspondence begun during the World Series the fall before. I’d taken him out in the boat, we’d gone to the Wharf together, he’d treated me to dinner at Popeye’s. We’d gone out in a big sailboat with a friend of his in Long Island Sound. We’d had bad sex, we’d had good sex. Our sex life was about three days old. When the invitation came from Michelle, his friend and my neighbor in Rockaway, I didn’t consult with him before accepting, because I wanted to be independent. I WAS independent, and though being with Pete and Angela had made me long to be part of a couple, I couldn’t assume that I was; I was afraid to. I didn’t know if Dick felt we were a couple. Anyway, I saw no reason not to accept the invitation, but I didn’t want to go if Dick wasn’t going. Michelle was HIS friend. As it turned out, he was busy that night with something he didn’t elaborate on, and he was trying to get Michelle to switch the day and time.)

I chose Pete’s course. They were dredging the Cow Path, a channel navigable only at high tide—and frankly not visible to me, on the chart or in the water, at high tide or low—so this was not the time to discover the Cow Path. A plume of dark clammy sand rose from the dredging equipment in the marshes. I went west, past the Wharf, to the buoys marking the channel at Ruffle Bar—Pumpkin Patch Channel. Watching the other boats, I found my way into Shad Creek, where I saw the backs of the houses on stilts that are visible from a car on Cross Bay Boulevard in Broad Channel. There was a tiny yacht club, some huge houses, lots of American flags, boats moored and docked.

I tried to find my way into the Wildlife Refuge by the route Pete had shown me on the chart (I’d learned not to call it a map), but all I could see was reeds, so I went back out to the channel and headed north, toward the skyline and the North Channel Bridge, to circle around by JFK. I was still alongside the Wildlife Refuge when the motor died. I got it started again, but it quit on me again after about three minutes or three hundred yards. I checked the gas line, checked the connections, made sure the throttle was at Start and the gear was in neutral. I got it started again, but it kept choking. I tried to sweet talk the engine, stroking it. By now I was under the North Channel Bridge, in water that was very shallow, according to the chart. I was very far from home and I was cutting corners. (This was the first sign of panic. I’d always been careful to stay in deep water even at high tide, but now, instead of observing the buoys, the channels—the lane markers of the sea—I was just heading straight for my objective. Not a good idea. If I were in a car, I'd be going offroad, cutting through fields.) I called Pete on my cell phone, which I had bought for precisely this purpose, but I didn’t have his cell-phone number, so I knew that my little SOS was sounding in the bungalow at the marina with no one there to hear it. Even when Pete came in from the boatyard, it was unlikely he would listen to his messages.

The motor conked out again under the bridge. I was drifting, between efforts to start the engine, and three guys who had been out fishing tried to help. They had a gaff hook and one of them came aboard. He got the engine started and said that maybe I had flooded it; it was idling O.K. They had just come from my home marina and didn’t much like the idea of towing me all the way back over there. Pete had often stated that beginners make the mistake, when something goes wrong, of thinking they have to get the boat home, which is not the most important thing and which is how motors get ruined. I could have asked to be towed to Howard Beach, on this side of the bay, but all my instincts were for going home.

My fishermen friends advised me to go full throttle across the bay. One of them gave me his cell-phone number and said that if I didn’t call he was going to assume I was safe and forget about me. Need I mention that three men on their way home from a day of fishing on Jamaica Bay were three sheets to the wind?

I managed two or three more spurts across the bay. Each time the motor died, I tried sweet-talking it, stroking it, crooning instead of cursing. It felt hot, feverish. At one point, I was so involved with the engine and ever so slightly panicked that I let go of the buoys: I lost track of them, like losing the count in a piece of music—it’s hard to find your way back in. I had been bobbing among some buoys that I knew marked the channel wide of the airport, but I couldn’t see the next buoy to line myself up with, and when I got the engine started again I headed directly for the smokestack on the peninsula. Basically, I set a course directly for home, with no regard for any obstacles in my way. When the motor died yet again, and I tried to restart it, I noticed it was smoking.

I started making phone calls. I called the fisherman and left a message and my vague location. By this time it was twenty to seven and I realized I wasn’t going to make my dinner date. I called my hostess, Michelle; she’d called me that afternoon to confirm, so her number was stored on the phone. “Hello, Michelle? Listen, I’m stuck out in Jamaica Bay and won’t be back in time for dinner.” “You can come late—we will wait for you.” “Oh, no, don’t do that.” Why wouldn’t she just let me cancel? “Unless you think it would be too much for you . . .” “That’s it, by the time I get home I will be . . .” I felt like a fraud. It was such an extreme excuse for getting out of a dinner date.

About Pete I realized that my only hope was to be in mid-message, sounding urgent, as he happened to be passing the phone. As I was prolonging my message—“Help! I’m out here off the airport and there’s about an hour of light left”—someone picked up the phone and said, “Mary?” “Oh Pete, thank God you’re there.” “No, it’s Pete’s friend Brian. Pete is upstairs in the shower.”

I was saved.

I explained to Pete, when he got out of the shower, that the motor was smoking, that I was alongside the airport, in the channel.

“Did you set the anchor?” (He pronounced it "ankuh.")

“No, I was trying to row.”

“Hah! I’ve seen you row. Set the anchor and relax. I’ve got to borrow a boat and we’ll come find you.”

I had in fact made a stab at rowing, but my oars had disappeared over the winter, and I was working with a pair of mismatched paddles. I wasn’t going anywhere. So I threw in the anchor. The phone rang while I was waiting. It was Dick, the man who couldn’t come to dinner, whose friends I was standing up. It sounded like he was at a party. “I’m stuck in the middle of Jamaica Bay,” I said. “Well, get out of there,” he said and hung up. No goodbye.

There was nothing to do now but enjoy the sunset. I had a camera with me (I’d taken a few shots of Shad Creek when it looked like that would be the high point of my adventure), so I used up the rest of the film on shots of airplanes taking off and the Manhattan skyline and the orange ripples on the water and the Rockaway skyline, with the trestle bridge I’d been heading for and the smokestack. When I ran out of film, I tried to write everything down. The buildings on the skyline were a deep, palpable gray. Gulls were shrieking all around me. Planes were taking off. Sunset was at 7:11. And now the moon was appearing. The water on the side of the boat away from the sun had a coat of purple over gray, all iridescent. On the side near the sun a network of gold veins formed by the wind or the current spread over the water, gold on black, weaving together into orange. Was it almost ugly?

I had only two light beers with me. I drank the last one.

Pete had given me his cell-phone number and I called him again.

“You’re not where you said you are,” he said. (No hello.) “Do you see any other boats where you are?”

“No.”

“Do you see a runway?”

“Yes. It’s all pilings coming out from the airport.”

“Is it to your right or left?”

That was a hard question. Both. It was to my north, but Pete, for good reason, didn’t trust me to know the points of the compass. So he said, “Where is the moon, from where you are?”

“Southeast.” That was a trick question.

“And the control tower?”

“East.”

“Now look at your chart. From where you are, is the water deep between you and the sunset?”

Between the cell phone, the chart, and the bifocals, I wasn’t sure I could manage in the waning light, but yes, the water was deep between me and the sunset. Pete needed to know, because he couldn’t risk ruining the boat he had borrowed by scraping it on the bottom.

He came out of the sunset in a flat white boat, with Brian in the bow. I was so glad to see them. I hauled up the anchor, and Pete tied the boat to a tow line. “Climb into this boat,” he said. “By the way, you need a lesson in reconnoitering.”

My job on the ride back was to make sure the little boat didn’t get caught in the wake of the tow boat and tip over. It did get caught at one point. In the marina, I climbed out, and Pete told me to row my boat into its slip while he and Brian returned the boat they’d borrowed. When they came down the dock, I was still in the same place, struggling. “What’s at the end of that line?” Pete asked, pointing behind me. “You’re snagged on something.” I drew it up: it was the anchor. It must have flipped out of the boat when it got caught in the wake.

I had told Pete about the three guys who told me to go full throttle across the bay, and he said there was a lesson in that: Don’t take advice from bozos. And another lesson: Don’t think you have to get the boat home. “And now we’re going to dinner, right?”

So we went to the Harbor Light, my second-favorite restaurant, after the Wharf, and I had Guinness and London broil. “No fish, right?” Pete said. I had told Michelle I’d call her when I got home. I didn’t mean to make anyone worry, and I did have the cell phone, but there were about four hours, from sunset to eleven, when I was incommunicado, sitting quite pleasantly, first in the boat and then in the bar with my rescuers. How was I going to account for this to Michelle and Dick? I decided simply to say that I had been kidnapped.

When I looked at the chart later, I saw that I was in a little back bay off Kennedy Airport, and if I had succeeded in going in the direction I’d been headed, I’d have gone up on a runway. A few weeks earlier, there had been a piece in the paper about some fishermen whose boat washed up on airport property, and they wandered the runways among jumbo jets before finding their way to the Port Authority Police. (That was point of the story: that in the age of the war against terrorism, the wayward fishermen at the airport had to find the police, not the other way around.) What would have happened if I hadn’t reached Pete? I probably would have tied up at the airport and sat there until the police came to arrest me.

Michelle rescheduled the dinner for the next day, and Dick went with me. We never did become a couple, though. Things started to unravel right after I referrred to him in public, twice, as my boyfriend, both times in a context of complaint. I think I knew that night that it wasn’t going to work out: him on his cell phone at a party in Manhattan, checking in; me riding at anchor in Jamaica Bay, ripe for other invitations.

The Last Sunset

1. The Phone Call

With Angela and Pete, more than with anyone I know, I always call at the wrong time. I called last summer to ask how Angela’s mother was doing—she was very old, and had finally fallen and landed in the hospital—and they were just walking out the door to go to her funeral. There I was in Pete’s pocket. On Sunday, I was going to wait and call at about six, cocktail hour, but I called at four-thirty, determined to check one more thing off my list of things to do: See Buster about outboard (check). Call Angela and Pete (check). I needed to get the boat registered, which meant I needed the title, which meant I needed to get in touch with Angela, who had registered the boat to her and Pete’s business. I caught them in the car: they had just gotten into Rockaway with a load of plants that Angela’s sister the nun, out on Long Island, had gotten on sale at Lowe’s, and they were going back upstate to the farm in the morning. Pete handed me to Angela, who said in her mild voice, “Hi, Mary, how are you?” And then, after I gave her a hearty “I’m fine!” she said, “Mary, you just almost deafened me.” Pete had put me on speaker phone.

I was overjoyed to hear that they were in Rockaway. I invited them over for dinner—my friend Clancey and I were going to make chicken salad and grilled vegetables—but Angela griped about parking and also said that they were not comfortable leaving the dock once they were down there. Well, I blurted out, could we come to the dock for sunset?

One of the things I have always loved about the people on the dock was that, though they’d lived in those stilt houses on Jamaica Bay forever, they never got tired of the sunset. The night before, Clancey and I had gone to the Wharf for dinner and, failing to find a table outside, we were sitting just inside a window, rather forlornly. I went out to the car to get my cap and returned via the ladies’ room to be greeted at the bar by the Boss’s girlfriend, Sandra. The Boss was there, too, hiding behind his sunglasses. They had seen me dancing out the door. (The Beach Boys or something silly of my vintage were on the jukebox, and I guess I wasn’t that forlorn.) I was so relieved for having gone to the marina a week earlier and paid the Boss: $1,500, $500 for the remainder of last season (when I didn’t take the boat out at all) and $1,000 for this season. He and Sandra got a table outside, having left their name with the head waitress, and I was trying to do the same (though we’d already ordered) when Sandra relented and said, “Why don’t you sit with us?” I was elated to be at the Wharf watching the sunset with the Boss and his girlfriend. They are like Rockaway royalty. It was about eight o’clock, and sunset was at eight-twenty. The Boss complained that some guy who was waiting for a table was blocking his view.

So I was crowing about this on speaker phone when Angela said, “To be honest, Mary”—uh-oh, what was coming?—“I totally believe that the Boss stole everything over the years.”


2. The Message

Angela needed to get off the phone—Pete had gone into a deli, leaving her double-parked in the middle of the Boulevard—and she said she’d call me back. With one phone call, I had shattered the serenity of a Sunday afternoon. I started the coals and strung up some twine for the morning glories to climb on; if I was going to be in agony, I would at least be able to check one more thing off my list. So I missed the callback from Angela, but she left a message:

“You can come over for the sunset, but these are the ground rules: Bring a bag of ice. You can have two beers apiece. We can’t offer you anything else—all we have is some leftovers, just enough for ourselves. It’s a little embarrassing, but that’s the way it is.” She was almost inaudible, or maybe I didn’t want to hear anymore. For the boat, she told me I should bring the registration and a Xerox of my driver’s license. (Pete in the background: “Or she can fax it.”) “And there’s no water.” They hadn’t turned on the water in the bungalow since the start of last season, when they came home to find the place vandalized.

I couldn’t decide what to do. Clancey didn’t know Angela and Pete—they’d never met, though Clancey had been out in the boat with me—and she was disinclined to go. I decided to jump in the ocean before the lifeguards went off duty, at six. Actually, the last thing I wanted to squeeze into the hundred and forty minutes before sunset was a search for a photocopier on the peninsula. On the way down to the beach I had the idea of taking a picture of my driver’s license, downloading it to my computer, and printing it.

When I got back, Pete called, in his role as apologist for Angela. Really, my friend and I were welcome. “If you do come, we’d like to know what time, so we can be semi-prepared,” he said. So I told him I’d be there at eight: twenty minutes to sunset. I repeated all this to Clancey. She was more disinclined than ever to visit the dock. To her it was blazingly clear that Angela, at any rate, did not want company. Plus dinner was almost ready. “Could we take them some food?” I asked, knowing they would have already eaten. It was just too awkward. Not even my plan to take a digital picture of my license worked: the crucial information came out blurry. The ocean had solved nothing. Pete’s phone call had solved nothing.

While I stewed, Clancey grilled. If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect that this was all a Tom Sawyer-style ruse to get my guest to do the cooking. We had grilled-chicken salad with fresh dill and free mayonnaise that the girls in the deli had given us in packets (after telling us that a small jar of Hellman’s cost a shocking $5.49); potatoes, striped squash, eggplant, and a multicolored pepper—Clancey said it was called a chocolate pepper—from the organic farmstand; and a bottle of red wine, which I sipped just a little of. “I’m glad I ate before going over there,” I said. I had enough anxiety without adding hunger to it. “You sure you don’t wanna come with me?” I left, alone, at about seven-thirty.

I bought a bag of ice and called Pete on my way over. The gate to the marina was locked, no sign of Pete—I was a little early—so I showed how independent and resourceful I was by parking on the Drive. They had taught me to call it “the Drive,” instead of Beach Channel Drive, as they had taught me to call Rockaway Beach Boulevard “the Boulevard” (the neighborhood kids call it the Dirty Boulevard) and Ocean Parkway “the Parkway” and Rockaway Freeway “the Freeway.”


3. The Visit

The dead-end street from the Drive to the dock, High Tide Street, smelled of sewage. A few years ago, a developer put up apartment buildings here, on a street that floods regularly, twice a month. Who would choose to live on such a street? Did the agents arrange to show the apartments only at low tide? Many black children, including a toddler, were playing outside on the stoops and in the street. There’s a storm drain here, too. Between that and the tide and plumbing that obviously wasn’t adequate, the street had turned into Rockaway’s own cholera epidemic.

Angela had come out to dispose of one small plastic bag of household garbage. “I shouldn’t have said that about the Boss,” she said right away. “I can’t prove anything, and you don’t need to hear that.” She mentioned some things, like their dinghy, that had gone missing over the years. I hoped she didn’t suspect that he was the one who broke into their bungalow, that it was an inside job.

Pete had gone into the boatyard to wait for me at the gate—we had just missed each other. I gave Angela the bag of ice and went out to meet him. He made me go back up to the Drive and pull my car in the lot. “Otherwise,” he said, “you have to walk down that nasty street again.”

“So is this a hit-and-run or are you going to stay for a while?” Pete asked.

“One beer,” I replied. I had to get back to Clancey, and I knew they were busy—they were always busy. That’s why I hadn’t yet descended on them upstate, in the house they were fixing up to rent out to skiers. I was afraid they’d feel they had to drop everything and entertain me.

Pete was sorry that Clancey hadn't come with me. “See those clouds?” he said, pointing to a tiered arrangement of fluff to the north. “If the sun goes down right, those will light up beautifully.” But there was a bank of clouds at the horizon, and the sun might just plop behind it with no fireworks. “A nothing sunset,” Pete called it. A dud.

He showed me the plants they’d picked up from Angela's sister. The S.U.V. was crammed with them—hibiscus, phlox. The sister had gotten carried away—some of them cost only sixty cents. The plants surrounded an ancient pump that originally cost thousands of dollars; Pete had picked it up for a few hundred.

The Boss had mentioned the night before that Pete and Angela had auctioned off all their furniture, so I was semi-prepared for the empty bungalow. Pete stood outside sort of ruefully, almost ashamed, as I regarded the splintered railing and shuttered windows. The back windows were shuttered, too. Angela had set out the paperwork on a table against the back wall. “We’ll take care of business first,” she said. I signed where she told me to. I gave Pete an envelope with eighty-five dollars and the betting sheet from the Kentucky Derby. When I’d offered to pay for the boat, earlier in the summer, he refused, then said I could give him ten dollars. I wagered his ten dollars on a horse in the Kentucky Derby, choosing the horse on a hunch, but trying to channel Pete’s hunch: I picked Super Saver, and we won eighty-five dollars. It was not the fortune I imagined on my way back to the O.T.B., clutching the betting chit in my greedy little hands. Still, as Pete said, “It’s more than ten dollars.”

Pete offered me a beer. “We’ve got one Spaten and three Schaeffers,” he said. I took the Spaten. They had no bottle opener, so he had to perform the cigarette-lighter trick with a screwdriver.

“Pete, Mary brought us ice,” Angela said in her role as Pete’s etiquette coach.

“Thanks,” he said. Now I know: for people who are staying in a house on stilts without running water in the summer, ice is the perfect gift.

I had a few other little gifts for them: a package of artichoke seeds from Amsterdam and a box of matches from Greece. Pathetic, but it could have been worse: I’d almost grabbed an open bag of tortilla chips to share, but Clancey discouraged me. The matches now seemed ominous. I hoped they’d be used only to light a candle.

The Boss had been sweet to them lately, Pete said, and told me a story: The Boss had called about the sewage over the winter, and someone came out, but the guy said the building was in foreclosure, so there was nothing he could do. Then he asked the Boss, “Who owns this property?” They were outside the tumbledown bungalows, uninhabited for decades, that the Boss’s grandfather the bootlegger had owned. “I do,” said the Boss. So the guy gave him a ticket for a crack in the sidewalk. Pete shook his head disgustedly. “And they come after us for pooping in the bay.”

Somebody over at the other marina that Pete does business with was also giving up on Rockaway. “It’s Third World,” Pete said.

“When are you going to come visit us?” Angela said. “We’re happy up there.” They bragged that the deer hadn’t eaten any of their garden. “Every day, he pees the perimeter,” Angela said. Pete described the drive along the reservoir from Ellenville.

The next morning they were having the gas and electricity turned off in the bungalow. They'd had the phone turned off last summer. “That’s thirty dollars a month we’ll save,” Pete said.

So this was it. I had been keeping an eye out for the sun from the gloom at the back of the boarded-up bungalow, but it was north of the door. There was no movement to go outside and watch, and only one chair out there. It was a long way from the days we’d sit outside at cocktail hour—Pete called it his favorite meal of the day—and I’d practice knot-tying, and he and Angela made fun of me: “She’ll learn to tie a knot when she loses a boat in the bay.”

Anyway, it was a nothing sunset. “Well, at least I don’t have to be sad,” Angela said.

“I have to go,” I said. No one protested.

“Mary, would you like that sailboat?” Angela pointed to a round stained-glass object on the wall: a boat at sunset, its sail shaped like a smile and striped like a rainbow. “Margie gave it to me, and I’m sure she’d be glad to know you have it.”

“Did Margie make it?” Pete asked. Margie was a friend of theirs who had a potter's wheel in her basement and decorated tiles and could probably do stained-glass work if she felt like it.

“No. I think she found it somewhere.”

That made Pete start scouting around for something to give me. He grabbed another sailboat off the wall, a 3-D one, its sculpted sail swelling out of the frame.

Outside, Angela offered me a low collapsible table with the points of the compass in blue on white—very nautical. It had come off one of the boats they handled, and I had admired it—coveted it, in fact. I took it gladly. Pete opened the door to the storage space between the bungalows. “Can you use a vase?” he asked, handing me a dusty glass vase that looked vaguely familiar.

“O.K., I suppose so.” But that was it—I couldn’t hold any more.

“Come back tomorrow morning and I’ll give you the Egg Harbor,” Pete said, trying to sell me the last boat in his inventory. “Two thousand dollars. You can take it to work.” That made me smile. So what if the Rockaway ferry was no more? I could make my own run to Manhattan.

It was not the sunset I had been hoping for, but it was good to see with my own eyes that Angela and Pete really are done with Rockaway. I will always be grateful that they accepted me on the dock and put me in a boat and gave me memories (besides the ones of getting towed in): water lapping under the bungalow, the A train rumbling over the trestle bridge behind Angela’s kitchen curtains, the swallows darting from their nests among the pilings in the evening, the swans gliding up to the dock, and the drip of the tap that the Boss left open so that the swans would have fresh water.

G.P.S.

I had my first experience with a G.P.S. last week, and it was just as I suspected: I am too defiant to take directions from a robot. I was on my way to Long Island with two friends, showing off by calling the garage the night before and asking them please to have my car ready at nine on Saturday morning (so decadent). We went down the ramp and there she was. I hadn’t seen her in more than a month. One of my friends said that the Éclair looked out of place among the Lexuses and the Cadillacs: a burro among thoroughbreds.

The G.P.S. was in the back seat. A friend with a set of directions printed out from Mapquest was in the front passenger seat. We were going to Long Island, to go seal-watching on a boat out of Freeport. I would need directions once we got to Freeport, but I knew how to get to Long Island, and I wanted to take the scenic route. We were well on our way over the Brooklyn Bridge before Ms. G.P.S. got her bearings. Right away, she tried to push me around. I wanted to go west on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (which is counterintuitive when your ultimate destination is Long Island, but that’s the way it works), and she suggested that I turn left after getting off the bridge: I went right. “Recalculating,” she said. At the light, she suggested I turn right: I turned left. “Recalculating.” At the left onto the BQE, she very much wanted to jerk me off course and take me on a joyride through Brooklyn, but I wanted to drive along New York Harbor, past the Verrazano and out the Belt Parkway to the Southern State. “Recalculating.” We looked out at the ships in the harbor, and I felt such a yearning to be on a boat, and then remembered that that was exactly where I was going: on a boat trip—yes!

I had thought it would be fun to experiment with the G.P.S., but it was actually annoying to have this bossy presence in the car, like a fourth for bridge who misses the signals and screws up the bidding and drives everyone crazy. She tried to get me to get off the BQE right away (I don’t know what she had in mind—a trip to the Ikea in Red Hook?), and, under her influence, my friends began to doubt my decision to stay in the lane for the Verrazano, but I sped on. “Recalculating.” Then she tried to get me to take the exit for the Sunrise Highway, which probably would have worked, but why should I do it her way when there was nothing wrong with my way? “Recalculating.” The one time when I should have obeyed, at the exit for the Meadowbrook Parkway South, I was talking, or something, and didn’t get into the right lane on time. “Recalculating.” At that point, I obeyed the G.P.S. and made the first legal U-turn.

Off the main road, I obeyed both my printed instructions and the G.P.S. lady, eventually reaching the fleet of Captain Lou on Woodcleft, one of three prongs of land between long canals in Freeport. The seal-watching boat boarded at twelve-thirty, and we were an hour and a half early—time to drive around and check out the fish markets and grab a bowl of clam chowder and a crab-cake sandwich. I had learned about the seal-watching tours at the boat show, at a booth manned by the Riverhead Foundation, which rehabilitates injured seals and sea turtles. Seals come south from Maine and points north in the winter, and a colony of them return every year to the calm waters of Hempstead Bay, behind Jones Beach.

It was my birthday, and I kept remembering how on my seventh birthday, fifty years ago (gad), my father took us to the circus. It may have been the happiest day of my life up to that point. It was a three-ring circus, with elephants and lion tamers and a man on the flying trapeze, but my favorite thing was the seals. I loved how they gleamed and balanced big balls on their noses and slapped their flippers together to applaud themselves. In my fervor for the seals, I began to cry, and my mother said, “Oh for heaven’s sake, what are you crying about now.” (I cried a lot as a child.) “Nobody is watching the seals,” I sobbed. “I’m watching them,” she snapped. Somewhat pacified, I kept my eyes glued to the seals, in the far ring, while everyone but my mother watched the stupid horses or the clowns, or whatever.

Now here I was on a boat with two good friends (we left the G.P.S. in the car), and every one of the forty or so passengers was intent on watching seals. The first one appeared to starboard at two-o’clock: it was resting on the platform of a giant cone-shaped buoy. Others we spotted on the port side, at about eight-o’clock, their sleek black heads gleaming. These were harbor seals. Some were splashing, and one put on a special show, “porpoising,” as they call it: arcing through the air like a brief black meteor. Seals always look like they're having fun.

Back on land, we bought lemon sole and sea scallops at the fish market. We detoured briefly down Guy Lombardo Avenue, for old times’ sake. For the trip home, we did not reactivate the G.P.S.—even for me, it was too much of an exercise in defiance—instead feeling our way back to the Meadowbrook and then to the Southern State and the Belt. I got off at Cross Bay/Woodhaven and took my usual route home from Rockaway, via the L.I.E. and the Midtown Tunnel, back to the garage. It was all very satisfying. My only regret is that I didn’t bring home some baby octopus.

No Snow Day

Mysterious are the ways of the Department of Sanitation. Now that it is law that alternate-side parking be suspended in the event of a snowstorm, so that the SDNY can mobilize its plows instead of its street brooms, the bulletins from the Department of Transportation have gotten spotty in their accuracy. Last week, snow was predicted for the evening, and alternate side was suspended while we waited for the snow, which didn't arrive. (Maybe it was snowing somewhere.) Alternate side was suspended again the next day, and the next, but the third day was a mistake, and the suspension itself was suspended. Today, it actually is snowing, and alternate-side parking is in effect.

If I were parking on the street, I’d be outraged. As it is, I had to trot down to the garage with my checkbook, an exercise I don’t enjoy, and point out to Julian, Julian’s superior, that my certificate of parking-tax exemption hadn’t resulted in eight percent off on my bill. Julian had to call Julio (or someone) while I stood outside the booth studying a flyer that said “Happy Cars Use Bumper Guards” (hmm). My bill for February was $152.36, but in March it will be $163.80; the parking-tax exemption was retroactive through January. Possibly I could have waited and trusted the parking company to prorate my bills, but I am determined to be vigilant and not let the parking industry (or the city) squeeze an extra dollar out of me.

Meanwhile, my sibling Dee was off to the Car Pound with five hundred dollars in borrowed cash to bail out her VW Bug, which had gotten towed the night before from a spot in Chinatown. She had parked in one of those sneaky areas with night regulations: No Parking 10 P.M.-4 A.M., or something. Dee was in town to do some recording, and luckily the recording was going well, so she didn’t mind, or at least her resignation in having to go to the Car Pound and cough up cash was tempered by the satisfaction of a job well done. The new CD will be out by the fall.

I still have not quit the Times, and am taken today by a piece by Charles McGrath, “Around the World in as Long as It Takes,” about an American, Rich Wilson, who is racing in the Vendée, “the solo-around-the-world sailing race” that begins and ends at Les Sables d’Olonne, France. “It is a route that exposes sailors to icebergs, the doldrums and some of the windiest stretches of ocean in the world.” Over the weekend, I accidentally recycled some chunks of the Sunday Times without first reading them, and I interpreted that as a sign that it was all over, that I could quit. I still had the Automobiles section, though, so I was able to read about the new “green” ice resurfacer that is being developed in time for the 2010 Olympics, posing a challenge to the great Zamboni.

According to the article, by Dave Caldwell, ice groomers first ran on gasoline, then diesel, and then propane, all of which pollute an indoor ice arena. Frank J. Zamboni built his ice groomer from spare parts in his back yard, in the late nineteen-forties. “In 1967, in Elmira, Ontario, a welder named Andrew Schlupp built his own ice resurfacer and started the Resurfice Corporation.” Schlupp has developed an electric model that is both green and much cheaper to use (though the machine itself is more expensive; Zamboni has one, too). I read on, anticipating the inevitable. “Essentially, all resurfacers work the same during what is called a flood. A blade on the back of the machine shaves the surface of the ice. The shavings are scooped up and a thin coating of hot water is sprayed on the rink, which is smoothed as the water freezes.” But the story did not have the expected payoff. The people who built the Resurficer (which, I have to admit, is pretty clever) failed to follow Zamboni's lead and name their product after themselves: the Schlupp.

Trains, Boats, Planes

I am addicted to the New York Times.

After the Inauguration on Tuesday (only two more days till Bush’s helicopter leaves Washington!), I am going to give up home delivery of the Times—not reading the Times, just having it delivered and reading it first thing in the morning. I am getting spoiled, sipping coffee in a chair by the window with a fat cat purring on my lap. I should be out there shivering behind the wheel of a parked car.

When I first subscribed to the Times, which I have done on and off for the past four years, the first issue that landed on my threshold proclaimed the victory of George W. Bush in the 2004 election. I wanted to cancel immediately. Now that we have Obama, I will be overjoyed to look on the President’s face. But the New York Times is like a drug: it sets up a vibe in my head that makes it impossible for me to think my own thoughts in the morning, and I have newly resolved to be my own barometer.

The Times stories about Obama in the days leading up to the Inauguration and about the miraculous Hudson River jet landing with no loss of life, thanks to the pilot and the local ferryboats, have been bringing tears to my eyes the past couple of days. The Quotation of the Day in today’s Times should have been “You’re never too old to toot the horn” (Obama on the train ride to Washington). And the most touching, burblingly humorous detail of the jet-in-the-Hudson story, to me, was this, from an article by James Barron in Friday’s Times (Jan. 16, 2009):

“Many passengers rushed toward the back, thinking that was where the emergency exits were, [Bill] Zuhoski said, but that part of the fuselage seemed to be sinking, and flooding, faster. ‘I started to get, you know, close to my neck underwater. I just thought I was going to drown right there.’

“He stripped down to his underwear, the better to swim to safety. As the crowd thinned out, he crawled across the top of the seats and clambered out. He said he believed he was one of the last people off the plane, and he swam to a dinghy that was bobbing in the Hudson.

“Everyone else in the dingy had their clothes, and everyone was dry.”

Is it O.K. to laugh? After all, everyone survived, and when Zuhoski got to the dingy to huddle with the other passengers, “each peeled off something to outfit him.“ Anyway, the laugh is involuntary, and filled with fellow-feeling and relief. Imagine being the guy, who, on top of being rescued from a jetliner sinking in the Hudson River, was the only one who took his clothes off. It’s like that moment in a dream when you are onstage, or in front of a classroom, or leaning over the photocopier at the office, and you realize suddenly that you’re in your underwear. Only, Zuhoski wasn’t dreaming.

I am probably going to relapse and keep home delivery during the first week of the new Administration. I don’t want to miss coverage of the Inauguration. Or further details about the miracle in the Hudson.

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.

Ship's Log

Sunday, 9/7/08. Bailed eight inches of rainwater, gift of Hurricane Hannah. She was a well-organized storm, even a compartmentalized one, dumping the rain in two installments and releasing her winds between them. Actually, after I’d bailed and even sponged, a puddle kept appearing near the transom. It turns out that the false chest, or whatever you’d call the hollow space under the seat in the stern, is full of water. Pete noticed before the storm, when we were battening down the hatches, that she is listing to starboard and suspected as much. I unscrewed the wooden seat and lifted it off: the water was seeping out of a tiny fissure where a screw had pierced the fiberglass. I added it to my list of things to worry about when the season is over.

I left the marina at about 5 P.M., heading up the bay on the outgoing tide, with the wind at my back. I didn’t know exactly where I wanted to go. I steered out toward a big red buoy, and suddenly there was a boat behind me. It was the Boss out on the bay, with a party of people in his boat, all grinning at me. He wanted to talk! I have trouble recognizing people I know out on the bay, basically because I can’t believe I’m out on the bay, much less that I know people who are out on the bay. Also, it’s not easy for me to hear over the sound of the engine, and I can't turn it down very far, either (that idle-speed-control gizmo again). Finally, I caught what the Boss was saying. “How long did it take you to bail out the boat?” he shouted. “About twenty minutes!” I shouted back (not counting the time I spent screwing around with the lid on the water trap).

The Boss asked where I was going, and I vaguely indicated north, toward Howard Beach, but I didn’t really know where I wanted to go. There’s the osprey nest in that direction. I turned in a circle, testing conditions. If I went very far east, up the bay, it was going to be a choppy ride home. I always hesitate to go west on the outgoing tide, for fear of being swept out to sea. So I headed south, into Vernam Basin, where there is a marina and a cement plant visited by a barge heaped with gravel or something. I figured it would be sheltered from the wind in there. I started from way back near a buoy and lined myself up with the middle of the channel, because the chart shows submerged pilings on either side.

I was going alongside the marina, trying to stay out of trouble, approaching the wall of old tires that the barge docks against, when some people in the marina started waving at me. I thought they were saying I shouldn’t go there, so I turned around. I took a closer look at them, and there was no doubt about it: they were waving me in. Oh my God, it was M. & D., the couple I saw on Labor Day, him on his bike on the boardwalk, her in the hot tub in her fabulous back yard. There were two other couples with them, and a pair of swans. “They’ll move,” D. said, when I hesitated to displace the swans. So I came alongside the dock, shifted into neutral, cut the motor, handed D. a rope, and I was at a hurricane party.

It was as if they'd been expecting me. D. handed me a Corona, offered me crackers and cheese, gave me a cooler to sit on, and introduced everybody. There were stories about Florida and the hurricane and someone's glasses falling overboard and waiting for low tide to dive for them. D. pointed out an osprey perched on a pole and gave me his binoculars for a closer look: it was a very raffish-looking bird. At one point we heard a blast from a horn: a boat called the Little Prince had returned to the marina and found me in its slip. The men moved my boat, not by getting in and starting up the engine but by using the rope to guide her into position and tying her up alongside another boat.

As the party wound down, I got ready to leave, in order to be back before sunset, at 7:17. The men looked over my boat as I got in. My chart of Jamaica Bay was lying on the seat. “This boat is missing two things,” one of them said. “A cooler and a G.P.S.” Actually, I have a cooler: I showed them the discreet silver quilted insulated bag that I’d salvaged as flotsam from the bay—flexible, room for a pack of blue ice, a bottle of water, and two beers. I think they were just kidding about the G.P.S.

Jamaica Bay Photo Gallery

Here is Broad Channel. Any resemblance to Venice is in the reflections. Note the swans, dead center. (I knew there was a reason I took this picture.)


The Cow Path, meandering into the open bay. Those two knobs sticking up behind the marsh grass must be Bay Towers. (Not the reason I took this picture.)



Ah! Even the A train has its golden hour!

Motorboating for Dummies

The first signs of trouble with my new outboard motor appeared last Saturday. I bought gas, having gotten about ten hours of boating pleasure from my three-gallon tank, and went down to the marina, but for some reason I disdained to consult my crib sheet—shouldn’t I know what I’m doing by now? First, I forgot to slip the lanyard over the stop button, which is like forgetting to put the key in the ignition, and then I forgot to close the choke, so that the motor smoked and knocked and sputtered out.

I recomposed myself and began again. I started up properly, cast off, backed out of the slip, and shifted into forward: it stalled. Rather than re-start while adrift in the marina, I rowed back into my slip, tied up, and tried again, with the exact same results. The third time I tried to re-start, I got no response when I pulled the cord. I checked all systems: lanyard, yes; gas line attached; choke open; gear in neutral; throttle at the start notch, halfway between the rabbit and the turtle. I pulled the cord: Nothing. I gave up. Apparently I was just not meant to go boating that day.

Pete was in the boatyard, rigging an old boat trailer into a “Beverly Hillbillies”-style wagon to tow furniture upstate. He took a break, and we had a beer in the shade and I told him my troubles. The cop was there, and the Boss came over and sat down. He was having a run-in with the DEP. “They’re killin’ me,” he said. We watched someone named JJ get towed in. I always get a huge kick out of it when someone gets towed in and it isn’t me.

Of course, nobody at the marina will have anything to do with my motor because I bought it from Buster, and any unauthorized work would compromise its warranty. All they say is “Call Buster.” On Sunday, I got on the phone to Buster, having made careful notes of exactly what to tell him about my 6-horsepower Mercury 4-stroke. He told me that one thing I could do was dump the gas. Everyone is always complaining about ethanol in gasoline and how, if it sits for a while and moisture gets in, it gets contaminated. I’m not crystal clear on the chemistry of it. Basically, as I understand it, when ethanol, which is made from corn, is added to gas, and the gas is left to sit, it turns back into corn.

I knew Buster was handing me a crock, just giving me something to do to keep me busy until he closed. But I was not about to dump three gallons of gasoline that I had no reason to believe was contaminated: it was straight from the pump, and I’d even remembered to buy high-test. I went down to the marina, hoping wanly that the motor had healed itself overnight. I yanked on the starter cord: nothing. I called Buster from the boat, but there was nothing he could do over the phone. I would have to remove the motor and haul it in the car to Broad Channel. I called Pete—poor guy, his cell-phone number is programmed into mine under SOS.

So Pete came down to take a look. First, he fiddled with the lanyard. It turns out to need some jiggling to engage properly. We got the motor started, but it stalled when he turned the throttle all the way to low. (I love the vocabulary of the internal combustion engine: choke, throttle. No wonder it’s intimidating.) Pete removed the cowl, and there, dangling off the carburetor, was a little piece of plastic, which he handed to me—a black plastic lever with a screw through it and a steel coil wrapped around the screw. It was the idle-speed control lever. “Show that to Bustah,” he said.

The question now was did I trot over to Buster’s with the idle-speed control gizmo, to find out whether it was a separate part that could easily be replaced or whether it was built into the carburetor, which would mean hauling the motor over there and getting a whole new carburetor; or did I go out on the bay? “Why waste a day?” Pete said. All I had to do in order to keep the motor running was not idle, and shift at a higher speed than I was used to. Pete showed me how far I could turn the throttle before the engine would cut out. “Keep the throttle at the turtle’s front legs,” he said. He scratched a new notch on the throttle with the blade of a screwdriver to show me.

So I went out on the bay. I am trying to learn my way via nuns and cans through the pols of Jamaica Bay (those grassy islands that you see more or less of, depending on the tide), and despite some major landmarks—the control tower at Kennedy airport, the high-rises of Rockaway, the Marine Parkway Bridge, and the Empire State Building, at east, south, west, and north—I got lost. When I got back, I took the part over to Buster. He spent several minutes with his back to me, looking at a computer. It turns out that the plastic bit is not a separate part that can be replaced but a chunk of the carburetor, which costs $190. I invoked the warranty, but it remains to be seen whether the damage will be covered by the warranty. Buster has to take a picture of the part and the carburetor, and send it to Mercury, where someone will decide if the part was defective. This could consume the rest of the boating season. Fortunately, while I was out on the bay I realized what Pete had been trying to tell me: I can live without this gizmo. I can wait and take the motor to Buster’s at the end of the season for winterizing, as usual. I just have to remember not to turn the throttle past the turtle’s front legs.

Prospecting

My friend Frank of Assisi quit the boatyard at the end of last season. Pete, my man in the boat business, said Frank was fed up. I ran into Frank on the beach at Fort Tilden last winter—the first nice day in February. He was just out for a walk, the same as me. I miss him at the marina, because he helped out and was very generous, and also because he was the low man on the totem pole, a position that, in his absence, is filled by me.

When I asked Pete what Frank was doing, he said, "You know those guys who walk along the beach with metal detectors?" Sure enough, the other week on my way home from the library, via Connolly's (can I help it if my favorite bar is on the way home from the library?), I spotted Frank heading through the parking lot toward the beach with his prospecting equipment. "Frank!" I hollered, catching up to him just before he climbed the stairs to the boardwalk. "How ya doin'?"

He had his metal detector in one hand and in the other a long-handled tool with a scoop-sieve-shovel for digging things out of the sand; he had customized it with a serious small shovel on the other end. He tied on a carpenter's apron and put on his headphones. I walked along the beach with him, but because of the headphones we couldn't have much of a conversation. Prospecting is an independent sport.

The metal detector, he showed me, not only ticks to let him know there's something down there but has a special digital readout that tells him what it thinks the item is. I held out my watch: "RING," it said. Close enough. He said he'd found something like eighty-four dollars up at Fort Tilden over the winter. While I was with him, he dug up a crushed beer can and a ball of tinfoil and a little piece of junk jewelry, which he put in his apron pocket. "Of course, it's better at low tide," he said.

Frank of Assisi was the only guy at the marina with a streak of the environmentalist. The first time I saw the Boss this season, he was coming up from the slips with an empty Heineken bottle, which he tossed into the bay. "What's wrong?" he said, when I reacted. Great, I thought—now I've offended him and he won't put my boat in the water. When Pete offered me a beer and I asked what I should do with the empty, meaning should I rinse it out before I recycled it, he pointed to the garbage can. "You don't recycle?" I said. "You can take it with you," he said.

I tried not to agonize over the Boss's delays this season. First you have to get him to give you a straight answer about how much a slip costs for the season. Then you have to come back with the money. Then, if you fail to catch him, you have to not spend the money until you have a chance to come back. Then you have to get more money out of the bank because you spent the first wad, and the Boss has to have a pocket to put the money in. Then he has to move a couple of huge boats on trailers and drag your little boat out into the open, and Pete says you have to ask him to bottom-paint it. Then he disappears for a week or two (his son gets married, his sister dies). You bring flowers. You wait. And then one glorious day the boat is in the water. But the motor is still propped up in your living room.

Now I had to refamiliarize myself with the workings of the internal-combustion engine. I also hunted down my knot book, intimidated by the knot the Boss had tied in my anchor line. Pete was away, so for help in dropping the motor onto the boat (as opposed to into the bay) I called on Frank of Assisi. I pictured him not answering his cell phone because he was on the beach, prospecting, with his headphones on. I left a message, but for whatever reason (was it me? the heavy lifting? or the marina?) he didn't call back. Pete returned, and I hauled the motor to the boatyard in the back seat of my car, and together we carried it down the gangplank and carefully set it in the boat. He lowered it onto the transom and tightened the screws, then stood by as I demonstrated what I had retained (with the help of my crib sheet) about attaching the gas line and opening and closing the choke. I've been out and back twice now, with no incidents (I found a piece of flotsam that looks like a small flexible cooler, and brought it home and rinsed it out, but it smells of bait), and my new maritime ambition is to take the boat to the ferry dock, catch the ferry to Wall Street, and transfer to the water taxi to East Thirty-fourth Street, commuting to work solely by water.

Sea Legs

I infiltrated the men's table on the five-thirty ferry last night, and was a little disappointed. They talked about golf, a violent movie that I didn't catch the name of, the market (one guy said the market is going to crash on Friday—that's tomorrow—yet he didn't seem terribly concerned and was even about to go on vacation), real estate, and a Chinese restaurant in Flatlands, Brooklyn, called Tasty Tavern. One drank a Bud, one a Bud Lite, and one a Heineken. They kidded each other about an article in Tuesday's Times which reported that Breezy Point, in Rockaway, is the zip code with the highest consumption of Budweiser in the country. The occasion for the article (here's the link) was the news that Budweiser is being bought by the Belgian brewers of Stella Artois. This can only be good news for Budweiser, and bad news for the fabled beers of Belgium.

I believe it about Breezy Point, by the way. Drinking alcohol in public is a crime in New York City, thanks to Rudy Giuliani. In Rockaway, the cops patrol the beach from the boardwalk, using binoculars to peak inside people's coolers and then descending on them if their coolers contain beer, and making them pour out the beer in the sand. Of course, Rockawegians know enough to drink out of opaque plastic cups and avoid this tragedy. In Breezy Point, it's just the opposite. You feel conspicuous walking around WITHOUT a beer in your hand. I went to a party there one Labor Day and saw people pulling big plastic wagons piled high with cases of beer. Of course, drinking in public is not an issue in Breezy Point because it is private property, a co-op, populated, incidentally, largely by police officers.

The men noted that we were way out in the water (usually the ferry hugs the shore), and we all gloated at the sight of a massive traffic jam heading east on the Belt Parkway in Bay Ridge. I am always one of the last to get off the ferry at Riis Landing. There were three skimmers, whistling black birds with extra-long orange beaks that they use, in flight, to skim bugs (or whatever) off the surface of the water. They were leaving little short-lived threads of wakes.

This morning, to keep an appointment, I caught the early ferry, at 5:45, a feat worth recording because I may not be able to accomplish it again this year. A heron was hunched on the dock, fishing. The sun was two inches above the horizon, and as we turned out of the dock and pulled away, at 5:49, it looked like a big orange ball rolling north over the Marine Parkway Bridge. At the Wall Street Pier, I transferred to the East River line, which, I learned, costs only a dollar if you tell them you just got off the American Princess. (Both boats are operated by New York Water Taxi.) This is a speedy yellow catamaran that zips over to Schaefer Landing, in Williamsburg, which is new, and then up to Hunters Point, in Long Island City, before crossing back to East 35th Street, where I got off.

What with all this boating, when I finally get to work, I find myself wanting to grip the edges of my desk as if I were still on the boat and it was pitching.

So Far

What I did on my summer vacation, so far.

This is exactly the sort of thing I would have made up about my summer vacation when I was in third or fourth grade and never did anything except play jacks and watch quiz shows on daytime TV. It was stultifying. I had to lie every year on my Summer Vacation essay and say I'd been to a farm in Canada, or to Amsterdam, where I saw people in wooden shoes, or that I lived in a trailer (this seemed to me the height of exoticism), or went to New York, where I rode the subway, which I imagined was like a roller coaster, and ate in an automat. I liked the idea of those little windows full of food.

All last week I commuted to work by ferry from Rockaway. Monday, I drove to the ferry dock, which is about three and a half miles from home and takes about seven minutes. I took the A train home. Tuesday, I rode my bike to the ferry, which took a solid half hour. I arrived parched, and the man who I think is the first mate gave me a bottle of cool water. I have my favorite seat on the ferry: top deck, along the portside rail, as close to the wheelhouse as possible. I brought my chart of New York Harbor along and successfully identified such sights as a water-treatment plant in Brooklyn ("Sewer" on the chart). I got sprung from work in time to catch the last ferry home, at 5:30, and was reunited with both my vehicles. I stuck the bike (or half of it) in the car and drove home.

Wednesday I drove to the ferry dock again. It was a gorgeous day. The beach at Coney Island is Felliniesque in the morning: locals carrying parasols, plump old ladies in bathing caps and one-piece suits dipping a toe in the water. Just west of the amusement park is Seagate, the gated community, set off by a jetty and a group of pink and yellow and baby-blue cabanas. Then come big Victorian houses and a lighthouse. The next landmark is the Verrazano Bridge. The boat stops at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, and among the regulars who get on here are a hardboiled blonde and two guys who look like undertakers or railroad executives. They come directly up to the top deck and put their briefcases and Duane-Reade shopping bags on the chests containing the life jackets, behind the wheelhouse.

The Queen Mary 2 was docked in Red Hook. It is HUGE. The Statue of Liberty is tiny and green. The ferry offers a great view of the synthetic waterfalls of the Danish artist. A guy in a yellow golf shirt got up and came over to the rail to look at them. "I don't get the waterfalls," he said.

Thursday I rode my bike to the ferry again, shaving almost ten minutes off my time by taking the direct route instead of cruising the boardwalk. It was another gorgeous day. "And not humid," said the guy who marked my ticket on the ferry. (He pronounced it the way my father did: "you-mid.") I stayed in the city late and took the A train home again, so on Friday morning I would either have to walk or take the bus to the ferry. I fell back on the A train, crossing Jamaica Bay at slack tide. There was a pattern of chevrons on the water, like a wake, but no boat had made one.

Friday night I got to take the ferry home. The Wave, Rockaway's weekly paper, reported that the Friday night ferry has turned into a party boat. Actually, every night the ferry is a party boat. I found myself longing to be a man and sit with other men at a long table, wearing shoes and no socks (the Mediterranean look) and a shirt with a subtle stripe, drinking beer and laughing, having sandy hair and blue eyes. I purchased a can of Budweiser for the trip home. Oh, all right, two cans of Budweiser (it's a two-beer trip). The finances of the ferry are fairly ruinous: Six dollars a trip (I bought a forty-trip ticket for $216, which gives me four free trips or a ten-cent per trip discount), plus $2 to get the subway up to midtown, and another $6 for beer if I get the ferry home—that's $14, or seven times the price of the A train. But it's heaven, and a small price to pay for it. Also, Friday, though I didn't morph into a man and get to sit at their table, a neighbor whom I know from Connolly's, the best bar in Rockaway, recognized me, and so I had all of New York Harbor and a drinking buddy, too. He helped me put the bike in the car and I gave him a ride home.

Rockaway Ferry

The weather was fine yesterday, and a bungalow owner’s thoughts fondly turn to plumbing. I didn’t want to spend my first day at the beach plumbing, but by the end of it I certainly wanted the water turned on. So I got out my plumbing notes and my plugs and my wrenches and the stick with the PVC fitting for the underground valve, and my neighbor T., God bless him, did not run and hide when he saw me in my plumber’s garb (oldest bleach-stained T-shirt, baggiest pants, mismatched socks, ancient red sneakers) but came over to help. He is skinny and can crawl under the house, and knows what a compression joint is (I had forgotten that the plumber loosened that connection last fall). We got the job done in record time, and T. even fired up the hot-water heater. I spent a few hours cleaning the porch and the kitchen floor and making a list of all the things I have to do (fix shower door, buy light fixtures, paint porch floor) that I can’t expect anyone to feel sorry for me for having to do, because, after all, I do own a bungalow in Rockaway. Then I treated myself to a cheeseburger and a beer and went to bed.

It rained all night, and was still drizzling this morning, but neither this nor my recent experience sailing in the Azores deterred me from taking the first opportunity to ride the new Rockaway ferry to Manhattan. It came in right on schedule at Riis Landing, where there is free parking outside the defunct Coast Guard Headquarters (I don’t know if it’s long-term parking, but I hope the Éclair is still there when I go back). The boat is beautiful. She is called the American Princess, and has a saloon inside with long tables that seat six, and an upper deck with benches under an awning, and you can stand outside and see Coney Island and the Verrazzano Bridge and container ships in the shipping lane and downtown Manhattan, all shrouded in clouds. Imagine what it’s going to be like on a nice day!

For some reason, there were many more women than men on the boat, and the women spent their time yakking away and applying makeup; the American Princess is much better equipped for vanity than the A train. The fare is six dollars (compared with two dollars for the A train). The ads say it has a bar and café, but the smell of coffee was coming only from the takeout cups that everyone except me knew enough to bring on board. I put my bag and umbrella on a seat, but I just couldn’t see confining myself to one corner of the boat, hemmed in by a suit reading the Times and a nerd navigating a BlackBerry, when I could be on deck approaching New York Harbor. I not only want to take the ferry to work: I want to work on the ferry.

High Seas

Yesterday I finally got out in a boat on the Atlantic Ocean, going from Lajes das Flores to Corvo. Flores may be the westernmost of the Azores, but Corvo is the most remote. For example, while Flores is dependent for a lot of its food and beer on a boat that comes in once every two weeks from Portugal, Corvo is dependent on Flores.

To get to Corvo, I was invited onto a sailboat called the Hannah Brown. She is a beautiful aluminum boat with a blue hull, and the owner, George, a very fit retired guy who used to be a cowboy (he is originally from New Mexico, and learned to sail in Chesapeake Bay), has been living on it since 1990. He has stories of Iceland and Norway and the Alentejo, in Portugal. He made us coffee, and had prepared paella, which we had for breakfast, with red wine, chucking the clamshells overboard.

Speaking of chucking things overboard, I was all right as long as we were protected by the island, but when we hit the open sea and George put up the sails and the boat heeled over to starboard, I realized I'd never been on a sailboat in the ocean before. In order not to get seasick, I had heard, you're supposed to focus on the horizon. George said it also helped to sit outside, where it was easier to keep your body centered, so I did that: sat in the chair in the stern, gripping the arms of the chair, breathing deep, and looking at the horizon, especially when a big wave came. I turn out to be a bit of a white-knuckle sailor, but I did not lose my paella.

We were welcomed to Corvo by two men and a St. Bernard. There is only one village, Vila Nova, and about four hundred people. We saw chickens and pigs and windmills and vegetable gardens (onions, carrots, potatoes, green beans, melons, cucumbers). The oldest houses are stone, with ancient tile roofs and wooden doors with faded paint jobs and improvised handles. The ship came in from Flores while we were looking around the village, and we watched it unload. It delivered lots of beer and sacks of cement and one container full of potted plants that had sat on the dock at Lajes all week. It took on some styrofoam crates of fresh fish. George was staying in Corvo, but I took the transit boat back to Flores. I was the only passenger, and it was not easy boarding: both feet on a big tire tied to the dock, right foot in a porthole, left leg up onto the deck, but the damn thing had a raised edge that I had to get over, and I ended up getting hauled on board like a heifer.

At first I sat on a padded bench right in front of the bridge, but the captain told me it was better if I moved, otherwise I'd get wet. So two crew members untied the bench and moved it to the stern, on the port side, and tied it to the rails. I sat there for most of the trip, until we were again in the shadow of Flores, when I got up and looked out over the rail at the volcanic stone covered with velvety vegetation and the waterfalls and the ancient stone marina at the foot of one gully that I'd hiked down to a few days earlier.

They did not charge me for passage. I stayed and watched them unload. The fresh fish were going to the airport and then on to Spain and other parts of Europe. The guy who drove the fish truck opened a case to show me a fish called an imperador. It was a gorgeous red fish with huge eyes (apparently they bulge out when the fish, which lives in deep water, is brought to the surface).

I had a beer in the bar at the port to celebrate my successful return, and a man named Izaias (I think), who lives across across the road from the house where I'm staying and keeps sheep and goats and cows, bought me a beer and gave me some peanuts (amendoim, one of the few Portuguese words I know). I thanked him and he gave me a solid platonic pat on the shoulder. I think I will remain on terra firma for the rest of my stay.

Ship's Log

The boating season ended abruptly over the weekend, when the Boss said, “You’re coming out on Monday.” He had a red scarf tied on his head, pirate style, and addressed me from high on his forklift, balancing a powerboat on the two canvas slings. He said I’d have to get the motor off and take it to Buster to be winterized. “Can’t I winterize it?” I asked. He shook his head no. “Warranty,” he said.

The Boss has been remarkably tolerant since I introduced a new outboard motor into the marina without his permission in August. After my voyage with the eggbeater and two futile trips to the boat mechanic known as Abdul, in Meadowmere Park, I had had it with used outboards. The Boss was willing to set me up with a new motor, but it turned out that I couldn’t go to his marine-supply store, out on Long Island, and buy it myself (“They won’t break it down for you”), and he couldn’t send his assistant, Frank, till the following week. It was already well into August, and I was beyond frustrated. So I ricocheted back to my old buddy Pete and had a meltdown on him. He made a few phone calls on a Friday afternoon, and on Saturday morning I bought a six-horsepower Mercury for $1,300 in cash at Buster’s, the second-largest employer in Broad Channel after Call-A-Head ("Portable Toilets of Every Description").

“Now all you have to do is enter Buster’s number into your cell phone and call him when you break down on Jamaica Bay,” Pete said on the phone. I was puzzling over this when we got cut off, and he called back to say it was a joke. (I have a history of calling Pete when I get in trouble out on the bay; his number is in my cell phone under “SOS.”) When I brought the motor over to the marina to put it on the boat, Pete helped, but he kept his distance. The Boss, who was a little distracted because he was hosting a party, grumbled, “Any trouble you have with that motor is Buster’s problem.” I don’t know what their problem is with Buster, or with Mercury motors (unless it has something to do with the markings on the throttle: a turtle for slow and a rabbit for fast). That night, I dreamed that wherever I went I was carrying around a great weight. I’m pretty sure it was my destiny as the owner of a new outboard motor.

I’ve taken good care of the motor, hosing it off after every use, so the salt won’t eat it, consulting the owner’s manual, checking the oil. I put a lock on it so it wouldn’t get stolen. Pete would have been welcome to use the boat anytime, but the motor has a little gizmo on a lanyard that has to be wedged under the stop button in order to start it up, and I keep that lanyard zipped in a plastic pouch in my backpack, along with the boater registration, the owner’s manual, and my crib sheet. I consult the crib sheet religiously, both going and coming: Attach gas line, Open vent on gas can, Attach lanyard, Set throttle on Start, Put gear in Neutral, Pump gas, Open choke, Pull cord, Close choke. I check the flags in the marina to see which way the wind is blowing and decide which end of the boat to untie last. I put her in reverse to leave the slip, then change gears and cruise past the cormorants, watching me with their beady red eyes as I head into the open water.

The Boss had given me notice late on Saturday afternoon, so I had time to go out once more, on Sunday, and to think of a way to get the motor off the boat without dropping it in the water. For my last excursion of the season, I had a passenger, my friend G., who lived for years in Venice. She had dressed all in black, so I lent her a shirt and a sweater, partly because I was afraid she’d be cold but mostly because I consider it bad luck to wear black in a boat. She borrowed a pair of shoes, apparently expecting the boat to get swamped and not wanting to ruin her own shoes. She had twisted her wild red hair into two horns.

We went first into Barbadoes Basin, because I had read in the Wave the details of a plan to build a new marina there. I was telling G. about it—room for thirty-five to fifty boats, a public boat ramp, a restaurant and catering hall—and she said, “But why would you want to change marinas?” I DON’T want to change marinas. While I had been at the marina the day before, watching the Boss and Frank and Pete lowering that boat into the water, a big excursion boat—the Golden Sunshine—had come by, on a sunset tour of Jamaica Bay. We could hear the tour guide’s spiel from the marina. The Boss grinned, and said, “We’re on the tour!” Then he shouted, “Go away! We’re the mean marina! Everybody hates us!” I wouldn’t be interested in boating at all if a boat weren’t an excuse to hang around with this crew.

G. and I crossed the bay, sticking near the buoys, the nuns and the cans. It was breezy, and my Vermeer cap blew off, which was too bad, because it was also sunny, and that cap was a souvenir of my sibling’s tree-cutting business. (Vermeer makes wood chippers.) For years I’d been wanting to take the boat into Hawtree Basin, to see West Hamilton Beach, a neighborhood that is visible from the A train, on the other side of the tracks from the long-term parking lot at JFK. From the train, it looks like redneck country. There is a narrow boardwalk along the tracks over canals and an isolated neighborhood of rickety houses with boats tied up in watery back yards. At moon tides, the bay is lapping at the floorboards. From the boat, the houses along the canal were charming, with a squalid little trailer or two, and clothes flapping on a line. There was a ferry, like a traghetto in Venice, to get back and forth across the canal, and a fire boat, and a boat called the Phoenix. There were swans, a fisherman on a blue bow bridge, a man having coffee and reading the paper on the dock behind a house that might have been a little yacht club. We nosed our way to the end of the canal, then turned around and headed back.

Before going back into the marina, I consulted my notes: Unplug gas line (so that the motor will putt to a stop and there will be no gas left in it), Plug in gas cap, Close vent on gas tank. I slow down entering the marina, and put her in Neutral as I turn into my slip. Sometimes I manage, once I'm in position, to put her in Reverse and come in for a perfect landing, but I have also been known to accidentally put her in Forward and then have to throw myself on the dock as she churns away, out of control. I usually rinse off the motor after raising it out of the water, but the hose on the dock had been disconnected. Frank helped me take the motor off the boat. O.K., Frank took the motor off the boat for me—it weighs about forty pounds, and I am certain that if I had tried to do it myself both it and I would have ended up in the water. He trundled it up to the parking lot on a handtruck and hosed it off. My job, as I saw it, was to keep him from laying the motor down on the side that said “This Side Up.” (The manual includes very urgent warnings against this: the crankcase will leak or something.) I stood the motor up in my car, on the floor of the back seat. I felt a great weight lift from me. Pete and the Boss may have washed their hands of me and my mechanical problems once I started doing business with Buster (and I may yet find out why they don’t do business with Buster), but once I got a new motor I didn’t have any mechanical problems. In fact the only casualties of the season (an admittedly short season) were a few splinters, from grabbing the dock when I misjudged my landing, and the lost Vermeer cap.

Into the Weeds

Last Sunday at high tide, a friend in the marina led me through the cow path to the airport. This is the other cow path, the main cow path being a high-tide shortcut into Broad Channel, which I negotiated by myself for the first time a few weeks ago, in a stiff wind. “Risk it. You need the experience,” the boss had said. That cow path is marked with a white “No Wake” buoy at each end, but in the middle there are plenty of tempting routes into the weeds. Lucky for me, a boat was coming out just as I was going in, so I knew to make a sharp right turn. Later, in the car, I could see the cow path clearly from the bridge.

So this friend, Frank of Assisi—the one who feeds the birds—left a pile of peanuts for the squirrel, turned on the tap in the fish sink to give the swans a drink of fresh water, and mounted his jet ski. His engine has 125 horsepower; my new outboard has 6 horsepower. He is on the equivalent of a racehorse while I am holding the reins of a horse-drawn beer wagon.

He idled at the mouth of the path till I caught up, and led me through yellow-green meadows of salt marsh. Sometimes he would disappear, and only when I came to a turn would I see which direction he had gone in. There were straightaways and doglegs and floating mats of weeds that I had to be careful not to foul my outboard with. We flushed a couple of egrets from the meadow, as well as some big dark goose-shaped birds. In the distance was the control tower of JFK.

After meandering for several minutes, we came to open water just south of a runway. A Homeland Security vehicle drove past on shore, flashing its rooftop light. I did not take a picture of it. “Do you know where you are?” Frank asked. I did. I had been following our progress on the chart, in case he ditched me. There was a skeletal pier parallel to the runway between me and the channel. Two big boats at anchor were tied up alongside each other, the only other vessels in this fishing hole. The bay is very deep here; I read somewhere that the fill for JFK's runways was dredged from Jamaica Bay.


Frank went back the way we came, and while I was still poking around in the high-security area he came zipping through the cow path at speed, churning up a wake.

Since I had plenty of gas, I went up to the head of the bay to Meadowmere Park, all the way to the Rockaway Turnpike. Driving in a car on the Rockaway Turnpike, you would never suspect that behind the International House of Pancakes and the carpet outlets was a scene out of Maine or Cape Cod: boats and buoys and stacks of crab traps in people’s back yards. If I had wanted to, I could have tied up and crossed the street and used my credit card to buy a new outfit at T. J. Maxx in the Five Towns Mall.


On the chart, it looked as if I could turn right just before the turnpike and go under a bridge and up a channel to circle back into the bay without retracing my route. The bridge looked utterly forbidding, however—squat and concrete, like something an industrial troll lived under. And the only way to tell if the water was deep enough was to poke through the weeds growing right in the middle of the channel and risk getting stuck in the mud. I was tempted—what is the point in coming this far if you're not going to see if there is a passage to the Orient? where would we be if Christopher Columbus had not dared sail over the edge?—but the tide was starting to go out, and there was a big "No Trespassing" sign on a waterfront building, and though I usually assume that this doesn't mean me, I headed back the way I came.

My jet-ski outrider got back to the marina about the same time I did. He'd been all over the bay. When I told my friend Pete where I'd been, he was unimpressed. “It’s not fun unless you have a breakdown,” he said.

Paerdegat

What I saw on Jamaica Bay last Sunday:

butterflies (Monarchs and something smaller)
bees
dragonflies
cormorants
egrets
geese (Canada)
gulls
a blimp
airplanes
police and fire and Parks Department boats
horses, with riders, on the shore

I was on my way to Paerdegat Basin, to find out what Paerdegat Basin is. It is a so-called “tributary” of Jamaica Bay (though what it may “contribute” is another matter), on the Brooklyn side, west of Canarsie, in Ralph Kramden country. On the chart Paerdegat is represented with a minute inexplicable square. The name is Dutch for "horse gate." You enter Paerdegat Basin through big hellish creosote-soaked gates below a bridge carrying traffic on the Belt Parkway.

If you’re at all nervous about your outboard motor, the sounds you hear under this bridge are worrisome, not to say terrifying: something is under terrible strain.

Beyond the gates was a surprisingly tropical scene. There were kayakers paddling up the stream, marinas, yacht clubs, and even a canoe livery, all with reflections shimmering in the water and the water’s reflection shimmering on them.

At the far end was a more industrial landscape: cranes, quonset huts, barges, and some, uh, structures I didn’t get close enough to to photograph because it began to smell pretty bad. It could be a dump, or a landfill (which is to say a dump), or a sewage treatment plant. I think they may be building a storage tank for CSOs. “CSO” stands for Combined Sewer Overflow, and a “CSO event,” as the literature so delicately puts it, is when a storm overwhelms the sewer system and it releases raw sewage into the environment. I suddenly got very afraid that I would run out of gas and decided to head home.