Slow Boat to Nowhere

It’s summer. Time for a sea story. But first, a confession: I don’t understand cities that are not shaped by water—a confluence of rivers, at least, the fold of a coast. Is there any reason Dallas couldn’t be a few miles east on its scrubby plain or Denver a few miles south against the mountains? The Romans had it right with their entrail-probing priests called in to divine the proper site for each new town. The intersection of a dry river and a rail spur is a poor excuse for locating something so important.

In New York, of course, this is not a problem. The city is an archipelago clustered around one of the planet’s best natural harbors, with dozens of inlets and washes, a back way out to protected coastal waters—the straits of the East River—and on the other side of Manhattan a fjordlike avenue giving access to well over a hundred miles of the interior. It feels inevitable, fixed, and connected, but still mysterious. I recently endured a late evening with a cocky cub reporter from the New York Times—new to town, but that’s no excuse: he spent some time referring to his walks on the West Side overlooking the grandeur of “Hudson Bay.” Even after being corrected, he persisted, and I grew to like the idea—the river as a direct line to the Canadian Arctic, the Northwest Passage discovered at last.

The strangest of New York’s waterways, on the far side of town, goes nowhere. From its long mouth behind Rockaway Point to the fetid little creeks winding away past Kennedy Airport, Jamaica Bay is an enormous tidal cul-de-sac. From the air, or on a subway map, it looks like a cross-section of the last few inches of the human bowel, a semicircular chamber filled with god knows what discharging out a single sluice. The edges on all sides are the city at its worst—capped landfills, towers of housing projects, highways. Except where steel bulkheads have been installed to maintain a channel (or retain a dump), the shore is soft and vague, and the streets move so easily into the marsh grass that—looking down through the turbid waters—you expect to see concrete, granite curbs, and asphalt stuck with gum and studded with hydrants and parking meters.

Inside there is a waste of tangled, marshy islands, many fewer than appear on even the latest nautical charts, slowly eroding and washing out with the ebb. It is New York City’s delta, soggy, forbidden, and forgotten. One settlement, Broad Channel, still sits midbay—with its houses on stilts and residents unlikely to welcome you—but there used to be many more such places, outposts of a type that require isolation. The other big islands, Canarsie Pol and Ruffle Bar, are barren and ringed in trashy beaches—mostly oceangoing debris, but one does see the occasional hubcap—their high ground impassable through the brush, a sanctuary for birds. But they are still somehow redolent of their rum-running piratical pasts as no-man’s-lands where casinos sprouted in the Roaring Twenties and held on, still pouring, into the years of Prohibition.

I’ve gotten to know these waters a little. After 15 years in the city, the absurdity of not knowing them was too much to bear. So last summer I impulsively bought a kayak. Not a skin-on-frame job hearkening back to knotted sinews, harpoons, and frigid seal hunters, not a hard-chined plywood craft of the type that you can assemble over winter in your garage (who has a garage?). No, it’s an urban kayak, perfectly unnatural, made of materials that are the product of better living through chemistry: carbon fiber, kevlar, fiberglass, and nameless adhesives. Its airtight lockers still reek of sweet resin. The boat, a QCC 400X, is one of several designed by a naval architect on his computer, not taking its lines from hippie trial-and-error or ancient Inuit lore. That puts it a little higher off the water, a little fatter in the beam, and, lacking the traditional raised ends fore and aft—evolved, after all, to ease passage through ice—a little shorter. Also more stable and just as fast. It has a modern profile, a plumb stern, the gray deck falling to a blunt bow like a little destroyer—features that drew me to it, I’m not ashamed to admit, as much as its seaworthiness or its uncanny ability to track across the wind without weather-vaning.

As interest in them has burgeoned during the last two decades, designers have had a motivation to experiment, and kayaks now come in every shape and size. Still, broadly, there are two types: boats that are boats, and boats that are prosthetics. Mine is of the former type—a boat you sit in, not one you wear. As such it is more suitable as a platform for lazy exploration. To move about in it does not require a deep repertoire of rolls and bracing strokes; stability is in the hull, not your paddle. But I can see the appeal of the other, tippier type. A popular instructional video featuring a master paddler from Greenland is called “Amphibious Man.” For that reason, I think, not very many kayaks are given a name.

I haven’t gotten out the vinyl letters yet, but I’ve been very grandiosely referring to it (her?) as Spray, in honor of the boat Joshua Slocum sailed on the first solo circumnavigation of the Earth. He sprinkled tacks on the deck to fend off natives in Patagonia. A giant crab captured the keel in the lagoon of an island in the Indian Ocean. In mid-Atlantic, in a storm, Slocum looked out from his cabin and saw the ghost of Christopher Columbus at the helm. Last fall, alone on the bay, I got bumped hard by a big fish in the shallow channel off the Canarsie Pier (the usual hazard there is fishermen with long rods, strong arms, and no manners). That has been it so far for sudden nautical dangers. But the smaller the vessel, the larger the seas; in a boat that wee, that low, and that slow, the threshold of adventure on the high seas falls accordingly.

My favorite destination, wind and weather permitting, is the beach on the north side of Ruffle Bar. And on that island, after pulling the boat up past the mud to the hard, dark sand, there’s nothing to do but look back at the city: first the deep, low expanse of middle-class Brooklyn, then the park-topped moraine climbed by brownstones, and beyond to the heights of that other island. It is a disembodied view of Manhattan: only the downtown massif (missing its twin peaks), the Empire State and the pack of towers in Midtown, and long caesuras in between. Without the reference of the rivers, it looks like one of those other lost, random American cities—floating, unmoored, at sea.