To the Polls!

Alternate side is suspended today for Election Day, and I lucked into a beautiful spot for it yesterday, when I came home from Rockaway, where Jimmy the Plumber and I engaged in our annual winterization rites. His helper, Gary, pumped out the hot-water heaters and turned off the gas while Jimmy removed the plugs from the pipes under the house and my neighbor complained bitterly about the lazy painter her landlord had hired, who was in such a hurry to get out of there that he left the brush standing in the paint can, with paint still in it. It took an hour and a quarter to turn off the water and blow out the pipes and pour in the antifreeze and fit a new four-inch plug into the waste line. It took all day to defrost and sweep and mop and rake and make sure all the windows were closed and shove the precautionary nails through the window frames to prevent break-ins.

Afterward, I drove to the marina, where the Boss, in his pirate bandanna, said, “You’re out of the water”—he pointed to my boat in the yard, still draped in the canvas slings of his boat launch. “You want to get that motor off, or it’ll get stolen.”

“Do you have a tool that cuts locks?” I asked, because the lock was rusted on. Before you could say “Kidnapped” the lock was off and I was driving back to the just-closed-up bungalow with the outboard motor in my back seat. I lugged it inside under the watchful eyes of some new neighbors, young men I’d never seen before, who probably know the value of a 6-horsepower Mercury. I can only hope they don’t have a tool that cuts locks.

Back in Manhattan, I cruised into the very same paradisiacal spot, in front of a doorman building on the Tuesday-Friday side of the street, that I had found on Halloween. There was a woman right on my tail who wound up on the wrong side of the metered-parking sign. I tried not to let any expression of gloating enter my body language as I unpacked—she looked a little volatile. Although vandals spared my car this Halloween season, when I went out to Rockaway on Saturday, the radio was haunted: there was no reception, and I couldn’t listen to “Car Talk.” The sound came back on for the drive home, but the volume went up or down depending on how much gas I gave the accelerator. It had fully recovered in time for the Monday-morning reverse commute, but for a while I thought I had a problem worthy of Click and Clack.

Spending time in Rockaway before the election was instructive. Many of us in New York live in a bubble of liberalism, but out there in Rockaway they come right out and say things like “Do you really believe a black man can be President of the United States?” and “I just can’t vote for Obama.” (They should have practiced during the primary. I even resisted the urge to vote for Dennis Kucinich, whose name was still on the ballot.) My favorite columnist in the Wave, Dorothy Dunne, whose columns have been appearing with less and less frequency over the past few years, so that I fear for her health, began her column with the proposition that Barack Obama could be “OUR COUNTRY’S SAVIOR” if, instead of squandering his campaign funds on his campaign, he simply donated that huge amount of money to solving the financial crisis. Funny, I had the same idea when I was about six years old. I had heard of this guy Rockefeller, and I thought if just one obscenely rich man gave all his money away, he could solve poverty. (Paging Mayor Bloomberg …) But I have since seen that this was naive, like trying to dilute the Atlantic Ocean by dumping in a Great Lake or two. And I was not surprised that Dorothy Dunne went on to write, “I am a McCain fan,” and to give the former POW her ringing endorsement.

This year, for the first time, I gave money to a campaign, for which I have been rewarded with countless e-mails asking for more. It's the only time I've ever hoped that the candidate with the most money wins.

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.

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.

Dominion

A discussion of traffic tickets among the crew at the marina over the weekend veered off suddenly onto the piping plover, and so I can say with certainty that in Rockaway, at least, “plover” rhymes not with “lover” but with “Dover” (or, rather, since this is Queens, “ova,” as in eggs). A cop brought up the subject, speaking on the understanding that everyone present loathed the plovers. And they do. Even the one woman present (besides me), a mild creature whom everyone loves, and whom I’ve heard singing the praises of the swallows, said that when she sees plovers in the marina she throws pebbles at them. The cop, who had just been talking about driving a car on the boardwalk (cops do it all the time), said he ran into a friend who spends August fishing off Cape Cod. “Why aren’t you at the Cape?” the cop asks. The friend goes rigid. “He thinks I’m kidding him. ‘Haven’t you heard?’ he says. 'You can’t go anywhere up there now. The plovers built their nests all over the beach, and everywhere you go’”—meaning on the beach in your truck—“‘there’s someone from the Audubon Society, pointing and saying, "There’s one!"’ He went on for a half hour. He says the economy up there is tanking because of the plovers.”

They all shake their heads. One of them quotes the bumper sticker “Piping Plover—Tastes Like Chicken” and laughs. “I wouldn’t wear one of those,” someone else says—not, I think, because it’s in bad taste but because the birders would be all over him. They have such a sense of entitlement—they're not going to let some little birds push them around—that if anyone spoke in the plovers' defense, one of them might start quoting Genesis: "And God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and OVER THE FOWL OF THE AIR." The resident Francis of Assisi—he puts out pans of water for the pigeons—claims he doesn’t know what a piping plover is. “You know, those little birds that run back and forth on the beach.” He knows. He is just not going to admit it in this crowd. "I thought those were sandpipers," he says. I pipe down.