by Hecate Kantharsis
Dawn came, clear grey, smelling of salt and hydrocarbons; we waited almost two more hours before the boat arrived at high tide. And where we waited? It felt like a trailer, but one that had somehow glued itself to Jersey City, a barnacle holding down industry at a dock, surrounded by former warehouses being razed to create Real Estate Opportunities.
Then, we walked through the shop and yard: lathes, steel stock, welding stations, miniature forklifts, three burly cats sitting on four-inch casing, the coffee truck and stood at the dock talking to the tug captain. He was making a delivery to the barge and would follow us out, sun on our shoulders and hardly any breeze.
As I followed my bag onto the divers’ boat, I suddenly grew light as if gravity ceased to function on water. We motored into the Hudson River, against the ebb; but, it was so smooth. Quiet, too. Surprisingly quiet. A few ferries. The occasional police boat or Coast Guard. One sludge boat from the DEP. This was once a highway and a road to ports upriver and inland. Henry Hudson thought it was a Northwest Passage; that he was going to cash in on a shortcut to sustain mercantilism. Today it was quiet.
I watch the pilot dance with the tide and the currents – layers of salt water and fresh and a tide going out, then slack – while we try to set two anchors carefully over an imaginary spot where reality had happened. Some broken equipment had fallen into the mud and was mapped by the invisible net of an ellipse, an approximation of the world, laced with divisions. It is so accurate, until you know that it isn’t, that there are disagreements on the exact curvature of the ellipse, that declination shifts, that the earth is not always exactly the same shape, that our magnetic field changes its polarity every few million years. But, though we think we know what we are doing, we really only live in this minute and the mutually agreed upon hallucination has not changed since a week ago. So, we are here, looking for something that may be sticking up too high in the channel.
We don’t find it.
The divers and the sonar cover an area about 400 feet on a side. We are satisfied that it has sunk into the muck. It is claimed and gone, someday to be transformed: Rusted or melted or rubbed away by boulders and ice moving with the water. Water finds it path and takes everything along.
I have grown accustomed to thinking in geologic time. Midtown is built on rock that happened about 485 million years ago, in a time we named the Cambro-Ordovician. So is Inwood built on rock, that upper tip of Manhattan, but it was a different deposit and was part of an old shelf, not land, not sea. The Hudson River is a gorge, not that it looks like one above the water until you’re up around the George Washington Bridge. The Hudson River came to be when a shallow sea between a chain of islands and larger masses was pushed and squeezed and the land on the east was raised up into mountains…finishing about 325 million years ago.
So, I look downstream toward the harbor, trying to imagine the glaciers, thousands of feet high grinding their way over the land, calving icebergs in the spring. I wonder if there were humans living here then, what they thought about their futures. I wonder how the gulls and the one tern I see with its trim and glossy skullcap talk to each other about the docks, the fish, the boats moving over the water, the clouds that are now rolling in, bringing snow.
And I think of how the son of David lamented that All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full. As I feel the ancient water in my blood, the rivers and seas we crawled out of, I think how pitiful he was. He missed the joy of riding the flood, knowing that indeed the rivers do run to the sea forever, and will claim their own and release us from our tyrannies.