Emily Scott and I decided to take a trip out in the Bronx River. It is the only real ‘river’ in New York City, meaning that it is not a tidal estuary like the East River.

Usually I feel bad when I plan a boat trip with someone, and then we spend most of the day just trying to find a place to put the boat in the water.

With Emily Scott, I thought it was just perfect.

You see, Emily is part of of a group of artists called the Los Angeles Urban Rangers.

While we drove around the Bronx looking for access to the river, she told me about their ongoing Malibu safari project.

It seems that public access to the beaches of Malibu is a contested issue, and the LA Urban Rangers lead tours of public land that doesn’t appear public. They issue maps and directions about how to navigate the mysterious pathways and shrouded entrances of the public shore.

“It’s funny.” I said. “Those places are hard to access because they are so desired, but with the Bronx River you would have to assume the opposite.”

Finally, we found a forgotten little scrap lot that seemed just made for putting a boat in the water.

I added it to a mental map of semi-legal waterfront access points.

We had started our day at 6 am.

It had become a perfect morning;

windless, overcast,

and not a soul in sight.

Aside from being an Urban Ranger,

Emily is writing her doctoral thesis in Art History.

She is particularly interested in Robert Smithson’s ‘Field trips’.

As we paddled, she told me about the journey she has taken to pursue her research; her interviews with Nancy Holt, and moving her young family to the east coast. She described the field trips that Robert Smithson and his friends would take to New Jersey and beyond to study geologic entropy in the industrial landscape.

“Can you imagine what they talked about?” Asked Emily.

“Yes.” I said, “I can.”

Up ahead there seemed to be a change in the river.

We were confronted by a small dam.

There seemed to be no choice but to get out and haul over.

I watched as Emily washed off her hand in the water. I was just reading something online that described the Bronx River as an ‘open sewer’.

But it really seems to have come back.

Huge fish move about in the shallow clear water.

At one point, the river seemed to fill from side to side with thousands of fish moving down stream.

I had never seen anything like it in New York.

“Do you see many people when you are out on the water?” asked Emily.

“Mostly men fishing.” I said. Before today I would have wondered what they are fishing for.

At some point a little to the North, the Bronx River goes right through the Bronx Zoo.

As the river narrowed and became too shallow to navigate, I had to give up my hope of entering the zoo by water and of seeing a giraffe, for instance, come down to the water’s edge to have a sip.

We headed back over the dam.

Emily’s baby and husband were waiting back in Park slope, and this river trip was just a small part of a visit to New York from Washington.

It was still early,

and it was just beginning to rain.

We hauled the boat back out of the Bronx River,

and joined the rest of the world on the bridges and roads above.

Jeff Williams is an artist who I met at the American Academy in Rome last year.

While most everyone at the Academy was studying things like baroque architecture and classical sculpture, Jeff made art in places like this cistern under the Academy; derelict, and abandoned structures forgotten by time.

Back in Brooklyn this year, Jeff bacame interested in the warehouses along Morgan Ave. “You know what is on the other side of those buildings,” I said,

“The Newtown Creek; the greatest non-site in Brooklyn!”

Jeff asked if we could go there in my boat.

I told him that there were plenty of abandoned places that he could make art about on the Newtown Creek,

but when we got out there, I started to wonder if I was wrong.

“Are most of the abandoned things upstream?” asked Jeff.

There were plenty of run-down buildings,

but every place along the river looked like it was being used for something.

Industry was packed along the banks.

The machinery seemed to be running itself, without the help of humans.

A huge recylcing center,

was attended only by birds circling slowly above the trash.

We floated by the the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant,

within sight of Midtown.

“Here we go.” I said, “Here is an abandoned bridge, totally forgotten by time…”

But while we paddled under the bridge,

a gleaming silver LIRR train roared past above our heads.

“I think this is all being used for something.” I said.

The wind was beginning to pick up,

so we stuck close to the shore and worked our way back upriver.

I took some pictures of the Kosciusko Bridge,

as the wind blew us back underneath.

The only thing that really looked abandoned on our whole trip was something that we saw right when we put the boat in the water;

some kind of silo or loading station on the waters edge, right next to the Kosciusko.

We tied the boat to a tree,

climbed up the bank,

and walked into the yard.

“This place has everything!” said Jeff,

inverted ziggurat towers

a house made out of a tank

As we entered the main structure,

I was reminded of the movie ‘Aliens’,

when they first realize that the architecture of the massive space ship they have entered is really the belly of a monster.

Everything was covered with a thick layer of cement.

Jeff said he loved the space. He would like to do a project here; if not in the silo then maybe just in reference to it.

There was one place that we had not explored;

a ladder that went all the way to the roof.

“Maybe we can do that on another day.” We thought.

We paddled back across to Meeker street,

and tucked the boat back in my studio.

A few days later we came back to the spot where we launched and noticed a new fence and security camera.

The Hutchinson River is a small stream in the Bronx, about 2 miles long, that empties out near City Island.

Mary contacted me about going there. She wanted to visit the only river in America named after a woman.

“It isn’t actually the only one.” She said. “There is one named after Queen Elizabeth.”

It seems different though. Far from being a Monarch, Anne Hutchinson was an Anarchist.

She lived right here, Mary was telling me, after being persecuted and disenfranchised from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

She settled on this strip of land, and then was killed along with her family in an attack by local Siwanois, who at the time had suffered continuous mistreatment from Dutch settlers.

It was the custom of the time for a warrior to take the name of the important chief who he had killed in battle- so their cheif, Wampage took the name Anhoek.

Mary Walling Blackburn started an experimental school called the Anhoek School. In a way, she has borrowed back the name.

There we were, on a pretty, cloudy day in September, in the place where it all began.

Huge apartments buildings rose up on one side of the river. Here was Co-op City, built in the 1960s on a landfill. It is the largest cooperative housing development in the world.

Only twenty percent of the actual land is developed though, so it leaves a lot of open space, like out here on the river.

We were amazed by the numbers of birds; herons, egrets, and cormorants, sandwiched in between the train tracks and apartmnent buildings.

There were signs all around that the local residents make frequent use of the waterway.

Presently, we came across a man net fishing in the shallows.

We stopped to talk for a while with Klaus Wolters; a resident of Co-op City.

He told us about a tragic accident involving two jet skiis that happened here just a few days ago.

He knows everything about the area, and he fishes for Blue Crab.

There are no fishing regulations here for the Blue Crab, and the New York State Department of Health advises that one person can eat up to six of them per week without serious risk of contamination.

Klaus told us that in 2006, he spoke with a reporter who was walking around down here for a story about local get-a-ways. His picture wound up on the front page of the New York Times and he became something of a local legeand.

“There are probably people waching you right now from some of those windows.” He said.

He must know too. Klaus said he spends a lot of time looking out onto the Hutchinson River from the windows of his own apartment.

We thought about it, but it was hard to feel the presence of anyone at all out here at the edge of the city.

The air was a bit chilly on the open water, but it was my favorite kind of day for boating.

As the river opened up by City Island we found ourselves struggling against the wind.

We hid out under a bridge and ate some pasta that Mary made.

“I should have done a little research,” said Mary, “and brought a dish that pirates eat.”

But I don’t think any pirate would have turned down ravioli with tomatoes from Mary’s own garden.

We passed by Goose Island. Klaus had told us that it was named for a woman who lived out here in the 1920’s.

As the story goes, she came to escape her husband, who was a violent drunk.

We stopped to explore.

Klaus said that he came there once with a naturalist to install a camera so that they could watch the birds. He found the remains of an old foundation, and believed it to be the house of old Mrs. Goose.

Back into the river, we decided to explore the upper part, where the Hutchinson River narrows along the parkway.

The river seemed to flow straight through steep cuts in the bedrock.

Cement factories and metal recycling plants lined the river. Here was the manmade foundation of the city; forming and unforming.

“How far up do you think it goes?” asked Mary.

“From the map it seems to go another mile,” I said,

“but we don’t have to go there.”

The wind and rain had worn us out a bit,

and we had seen most of what there was to see along Anne Hutchinson’s river.