It’s easy to forget that New York is a port city. There is an ocean and a moon and a river and they all intersect there , where we decided to put all of these buildings and people and roads. The bricks and bodegas seem immune to these forces, but we learned this was an illusion when Hurricane Sandy surged into our basements. When there is a storm you can can hear all through Brooklyn the ships and their thundering fog horns. Unable to enter, they are an impatient herd at the mouth of the harbor. Full of fuel and things from China, they wait for clear skies and calm waters. From the beaches of Far Rockaway you can see ships lined up for miles.
Unless we need the ocean, we can forget it’s even there.
I downloaded an app that tells me what tide it is, what phase the moon is in, when it will rise and set. I measure the speed of the wind and notice the humidity in the air. And even though the sky here is usually a strange orange color at night, a few stars are able to squeeze through the haze and even some small amount of celestial navigation is possible.
New York City was home. In 1985 I was born in this port and 30 years later I decided to leave.
As if in subconscious preparation for that moment, I had spent the last few years placing my memories of New York in small brown coin envelopes. Each one has the name of a place carefully
hand-painted on it in Ultramarine Blue. Washington Square Park. The Southern Tip of Roosevelt Island. The Northern End of Manhattan Avenue. I curl the first letter of each place just a bit – for decorative effect. Inside each envelope are a few pieces of paper, price tags actually, like the ones you would find at a thrift store. There’s a white one with the date, a yellow one with a map and another white one with a photo. A bookmark for my brain - enough to remember what happened, where and when.
Inside another set of brown coin envelopes are paintings not of moments in time, but of tide charts. These document the water flowing in and out of New York Harbor according to a book of tides for 2002. Also in Ultramarine, the small arrows painted on these tags indicate the direction of the water at high and low tide. See, this is how it flows.
I use the same paints and palettes that my dad bought me when I was sixteen. He was quick to pull over the car and show me all those parts of New York where the maritime and the urban intersect -- The little parking lot off the Belt Parkway where the huge barges come in and out of the Narrows. Or Hells Gate, the triangular bit of water just north of Roosevelt Island where tides swirl in an all directions at all times. He made it sound like the Bermuda’s Triangle of New York City, with shipwrecks and corpses found spinning around in jetties after months. The makeshift marina at that North end of Manhattan Avenue where a few sailboats are tied to the janky edges of Newtown creek.
The small brown envelopes are the final resting place of my memories of him. Some are so hard to look at that I can barely hold my hand steady to paint the letters of the place. Greenpoint, for example. I wish I could show them all to you at once, but that’s not how memory works. The problem is that I have to connect all the dots for myself first, put all the envelopes in the right place.
I want you to feel all that I have felt in this sparkling gray city. For me, the waters here have begun to rise. It’s time to pack up and move to higher ground. I think I’m headed to a place up north, where the Catskill Mountains have become an archipelago.
Have you ever heard of Hunter Island?
