Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore,
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,
Others will see the islands large and small;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high,
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide.
I've always wanted to enter New York harbor by boat. Crossing the beautiful Verrazano Narrows bridge by car for the first time, a couple of years ago, accentuated that desire. I gazed over the railing at the barges and merchant ships, the sailboats and tugs, and the busy ferries leaving white wakes as they sped toward their destinations across the magnificent harbor, toward the blue towers of Manhattan in the distance, and felt filled with a longing I didn't even understand.
Recently we were in Brooklyn visiting a dear friend. She suggested that we walk down to the Bush Terminal Pier, no longer used for shipping, but recently developed into a low-key waterfront park. We walked down the slanting Brooklyn streets toward the water, along the abandoned warehouses and railroad sidings, and finally out onto the pier.
There, at water-level, we were much closer to Manhattan than from the bridge, but with a similar view: the Statue of Liberty at far left, the new Freedom Tower of lower Manhattan at the right. We were nearly alone; a couple lay on the rocks listening to soft music, and a hooded man sat leaning on his bicycle and gazing across the water at the New Jersey docks.
I looked at the city, and thought about the few times I had been in a boat on this water. I had taken ferries across the Hudson from New Jersey, but had never been in the greater harbor beyond Manhattan. "When I was five, the first time I ever came to the city, my grandparents took me on a boat that went around the island of Manhattan," I told K.
"Yes, the Circle Line," she answered. "It's still running."
"I've always wanted to enter the harbor by boat," I said. "Maybe it's because of my ancestors who came to Brooklyn in the late 1800s -- I think I've always wanted to feel what it might have felt like for them, as much as that's possible now."
She thought for a moment and then said: "There's a ferry from here to Far Rockaway - it goes under the Verrazano and back - we can do it tomorrow!"
And so, we did. We left early the next morning and rode the commuter ferry -- a fast catamaran that, astoundingly, costs the same as a subway ticket -- out of the harbor, through the Narrows, and then east along Coney Island to dock at Far Rockaway, a narrow island that faces the open ocean.
From the pier, we walked across the island -- barely a ten minute affair -- stopping to buy a coffee and a bagel with lox to eat on the ocean-side beach, also barely-populated at that hour on a weekday.
After our breakfast on the sand, we walked barefoot on the water's edge for a while, foamy waves lapping at our ankles, as gulls flew overhead and sandpipers scampered with the incoming and outgoing water, and then headed back to the pier for the return journey and my long-awaited entry into the harbor under dramatic clouds heavy with rain.
I too many and many a time cross’d the river of old,
Watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls, saw them high in the air floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,
Saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies and left the rest in strong shadow...
When I posted some pictures of this trip on Instagram, my friend Lorianne of Hoarded Ordinaries pointed me to Walt Whitman's poem, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," which was included in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. As I read, I was moved, and felt the distance between the poet and myself collapse, just as he had written a century and a half ago.
I thought about my great-grandfather, who had come from England around the time Whitman wrote his poem, and had become a jeweler in Brooklyn -- the maker of a gold ring that was passed down to me, that I always wear now on the little finger of my right hand.
What is it then between us?
What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?
Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not,
I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,
I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it,
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me...
But my thoughts were also personal. I occurred to me that New York has functioned as a kind of touchstone, with my experiences here forming a series that mirrors different stages of my life, and growth; how the intensity and excitement I've always felt in this, my favorite of all cities, used to be accompanied by the insecurities of the small-town country girl that I once was, unsure of how to dress, positive that my inexperience and trepidation were obvious to anyone who saw me.
So many memories! Peering into the magical animated windows of Fifth Avenue shops when I was five, matched by the enchantment of seeing My Fair Lady and Camelot. Walking through scary dark streets near Times Square with a long-haired college boyfriend, now dead, during the gritty days of the 1970s, on our way to see "Fritz the Cat." The seductive energy of walking down Fifth Avenue many years later, on the day I received an offer from a New York publisher -- and how I had turned that offer down and driven out of the city, knowing I'd down the right thing, that the strings attached weren't worth it, or right for me. Marching through the streets in anti-war demonstrations, and looking down at them from the Empire State Building, as a little girl, or the World Trade Center in my forties; going back on a somber day to pay my respects after 9/11.
I thought of some of my closest friends, who've always lived here, and all the things we've done together: the art that fills the museums; the music that fills the theaters and clubs; the food from every corner of the world; the stores where you can buy, or at least look at, just about anything. There have been parties and weddings and funerals, countless meals in ethnic restaurants and New York delis, countless slices of pizza bought on the street. And even though I've become a city person myself, and live in a quite-different large city in a quite-different country, New York (where I've never lived) is still home, in the sense of a place to which I'll always return, a place I hope will remain, not just throughout my own lifetime but, like Whitman, hundreds of years from now, for those who will come after me, because the anonymity and shelter of the great city are also major parts of its identity, just as they shape ours.
Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemm’d Manhattan?
River and sunset and scallop-edg’d waves of flood-tide?
The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the twilight, and the belated lighter?
Will New York last? I looked at lower Manhattan, where a single tower has replaced the fallen twins. The waters of the harbor, too, will rise -- K. pointed out places that were devastated by Hurricane Sandy, which is unlikely to be an isolated freak event now that the oceans and land are in the grip of global warming.
I don't know. As the ferry passed under the Verrazano and we entered the harbor, I wasn't thinking about any of that anymore; I was just feeling the wind in my hair, looking at the happy faces of the other passengers on the upper deck, none of whom seemed jaded by what was probably a much more routine journey. We overtook a tall white sailboat, and the impossibly dense skyline of the city came closer and closer: a fifty-dollar experience for the price of a subway ticket. Because that's New York, too, where some of the best memories have come to me free and unexpected, and through the hands of people I've loved.
It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.
