The Broom comes early on this block. On Monday, it rumbled around the corner at 8:40 A.M. Thursday it showed up at 8:44. That means that if you get here at nine looking for an 8:30-10 spot, you may be too late. But if you happen to be sitting here already, in a nice, single-car spot between a No Standing sign and a curb cut, once the Broom has passed, the pressure is off. You can turn off the lights and the windshield wipers, move the seat back, and enjoy the view: gingkos (still green), an ornate tower top, a line of pigeons silhouetted on a roof.
Last week, after getting the water shut off at the bungalow (let it snow!), I went down to the boatyard to turn in the lanyard—the red coil with the black plastic ring that fits over the ignition on my outboard—so that the motor can be put away properly for the winter. The boat has been out of the water since the hurricane.
I went out on the bay three or four times this summer: visited the BOATEL, the art project/hotel made of boats at the 59th Street Marina, and ran aground at low tide off Broad Channel (I had to use the oars as poles to get out of the muck and then row). But I had no engine trouble, and that, combined with being away a lot, made me decide not to put the boat back in the water. I like having a season where I can say I had no engine trouble.
Ahead of me, a car left its spot and zipped across the street to take a spot that that had just opened on the Tuesday-Friday side. No sooner had he pulled out than another car swam in. It was strangely silent in the car: I had to keep the windows rolled up against the rain. The only sound was the swish of tires on wet asphalt.
The marina boss had left for the weekend, so I put the lanyard in the office with a note and called to make sure he'd found it. I also wanted to ask if he'd heard about the king tide. It was in the Times on October 26th: “A king tide will be running Wednesday and Thursday because gravitational forces of the sun, the moon and the earth will be lined up in a cue shot of fleeting geometry and rare power.” (The article, by Jim Dwyer, was about how this extra-high tide was a harbinger of things to come: the ocean level has been rising and could be this high all the time by 2080.)
The Boss had not seen the Times. “That’s all I need,” he said. “Another high tide.” During Hurricane Irene, he had had a foot and a half of water in his house. “Did they say how high it would be?”
"One to two feet above normal."
“Didja hear I got robbed?” I had heard, but I wanted him to tell it. “The restaurant barge. Twice.“ The barge, formerly a restaurant, is moored behind the dock. I've been dying to get in there; I see that they've been working on it, but it doesn't look much like a restaurant yet.
"What did they get?" I asked
"Tools and liquor. There were five of them. They saw the liquor, so they came back for more. My good tools. We’re trying to catch them. We got cameras. We took fingerprints.” There are cops living on the dock, so they may very well catch them. He didn't sound as mad as he must have been when it happened. I heard he was in a really bad mood.
The garbage recycling truck pulled up alongside me and started crunching glass and plastic. When it moved on, the garbagemen followed it, on the sidewalk. One of them was wearing big orange gloves, rubber boots, and gold earrings—she was a garbage girl.
Across the street, in a pile of bulky recyclable items, was a memento mori: the grille off a small truck or an S.U.V., silver gray. “Don’t look at that,” I wanted to say to the Éclair. The rain had tapered off by the time I got out of the car, at ten. I'd been sitting there so long that in Jamaica Bay the king tide would have begun to ebb already.
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