Last month, I met Sarah Cameron Sunde and her friend Fuse at Hallet’s Cove in Queens for a special trip of the Tide and Current Taxi, a historic reenactment.

Sarah will perform a durational artwork this week about climate change and our relationship with the rising sea, a work that she has performed in nine cities around the world.

We went on almost this same trip back in 2105 when she was scouting locations for the performance.

Fuse has been a supporter of the project ever since she started going to the cove.

He lives nearby and often navigates the cove in his own boat,

but today he agreed to travel with us to check out the river around the cove,

and see some new places along the shore.

We edged into Hell’s Gate where the water was deceptively calm. We could feel the changing tide.

We passed by Socrates Sculpture Park and saw the Mark di Suvero sculptures on the bank.

In fact, the entire bank itself seemed to be sculpted or made of sculptures.

We came into a pretty cove with a sewer tunnel at the end.

I thought of the trip as mostly a chance to interact with Sarah’s project, so it wouldn’t necessarily relate to the theme of ‘sound’ that I had set out for this summer, but then we hear something down at the end of the tunnel.

At first, we thought someone was talking to us from the other end of the tunnel but we realized it was our own voices, a clear and profound echo, coming from the back of the tunnel.

My favorite thing about going into tunnels is coming out after on a bright sunny day.

Back at the beach, we talked about Sarah’s performance.

Sarah brought out the same shirt that she has worn for the project since the very first day when we found this spot.

Now she has been around the world with it and back to New York for the piece that will take place today at Hallet’s Cove.

When I made ‘sound’ the theme of the Tide and Current Taxi this year, my real dream was to travel in my boat with someone like Suzanne Thorpe,

an artist and composer whose site-specific installations often make something audible out of quiet and overlooked aspects in our environment.

One of my favorite artworks by Suzanne is Balancing Act (2009) a collaboration with Philip White, where they turned a 633-ton steel ship into a giant electronic instrument, sensitive to movements in the sea. (image credit)

For her most recent project Tending Ostreidae: Serenades for Settling, Suzanne and Stephanie Rothenberg are collecting sounds of oyster habitats for an operetta and sound installation they will create on Governors Island next year. It will be a fully networked sculptural environment, complete with real pools, robotic oysters, video projections, and underwater drone footage of the New York Harbor.

Their field recordings also happen to be an act of citizen science, recording the environmental impact of sound pollution on oyster habitat, which has an important role in oyster reef development.

When larval oysters are looking for a place to settle they are only .1mm across, and they can sense minute vibrations in the environment. Studies show that they respond to the sound of healthy reefs, in fact, sound pollution might be impacting the oyster’s habitat decline more than chemical pollution.

Suzanne wanted to return to the docks of the Billion Oyster Project in Bushwick Inlet to record sound. The sound here might provide a baseline for the study embedded within Tending Ostreidae. Bushwick Inlet is much more protected from noise than Billion Oyster’s other habitat infrastructure around the city.

Below the docks, we could see cages filled with oysters, and also other creatures making use of the habitat.

Suzanne dropped her hydrophone into the water and started to listen.

It seemed like having my boat nearby would make too much noise, so I pushed away and explored the shore of the inlet,

did some beach combing, etc.

It took about an hour to collect sound, there were toadfish, a million snapping sounds from other tiny creatures, and distant motorboats. Suzanne said there was a lot going on down there, even on a Sunday morning. When we had everything we needed, Suzanne agreed to paddle back to Greenpoint, closer to where I keep the boat.

We passed by some ‘glampsites’ and a temporary luxury container hotel on the Williamsburg waterfront.

I told Suzanne that in Greenpoint she might have to climb a ladder and a fence to get out of the boat.

She told me about all the times she’d boarded boats from the sides of bulkheads and empty lots around New York City. Her friends are the ones who started the Frying Pan project in the 1980s and they were quite accustomed to using the harbor like their very own backyard. “I’ll be fine,” she said,

and she was.

Here is what the oyster’s home sounded like that day:

On the 4th of July, I set out with Carla Edwards and Jeff Williams to see fireworks on the East River.

From Newtown Creek, we would have front row seats for the Macy’s display,

and almost everyone I know with a boat was out on the water.

It was spectacular.

We tied up to the Tideland Institute barge, a beautiful dock and social scene designed by the amazing Danielle Butler and Nathan Austin.

They weren’t listening to the Macy’s music program, the one designed to go along with the fireworks would have been a mashup of patriotic and pop standards played by a military band. They were listening to something completely different, and it seemed like a sweet and subtle shift, a perfect refusal for the moment.

“It’s Motzart’s Sull’aria … che soave zeffiretto,” said Nathan.

When Nathan sent a link about it later, I thought maybe there was even more to it. It’s a beautiful song, and the characters who perform it in the opera Figaro are duplicitous, plotting, and eventually right. So here is the Macy’s 2022 fireworks display set to Sull’aria che soave zeffiretto:

I first thought to invite Francisca Benitez on a sound-oriented boat journey because her amazing multidisciplinary artwork so often engages sound,

or its absence. (performance of Pier 54: Soliloquy in Signs, 2014, Photo by Liz Ligon)

A few weeks earlier I had seen her perform with her frequent collaborators, the Stop Shopping Choir,

and our idea was to go to U Thant Island,

a tiny scrap of land in the shadow of the United Nations building, named for the former Secretary General.

I have been close to the island before, but for this mission, we would actually need to get Fran on land, not easy with the crashing waves and my delicate boat.

She had a little gift for the island, a tiny Chilean pepper tree, a Huingan from her home country.

Perhaps it would do well out here among the cormorants or at least among their guano.

Also, I was thinking of another idea, to record the sound of the cormorants.

When I looked it up earlier, I was amazed. Did they really sound like that? Perhaps I had never been close enough to hear.

When we approached the island, we found out why. Although the seagulls stayed to yell and yell about our arrival,

the cormorants took flight and hung out a few hundred feet away.

Fran noticed something similar about the Huingan tree and the cormorant when she looked them up online the night before. Both are classified by the International Union for Conservation as ‘Species of Least Concern’ because they do not appear to be facing any imminent environmental threat.

Perhaps U Thant will do as well for both of them.

We paddled back to Greenpoint as the day advanced

and had breakfast at Fran’s favorite spot.

Here is what a cormorant sounds like if you can get up close:

But here is what things sounded like to us that day:

I’ve always wondered what it would be like to bring musicians into the abandoned Whale Creek Transfer Station in Greenpoint.

The cavernous interior was made so that trash trucks could dump directly into barges headed out to sea. You can still see the openings in the ceiling, where millions of tons of trash must have tumbled through over the decades. The whole thing is empty now, totally quiet, waiting for some new cacophony.

Jennifer Sirey, Michelle Segre, and Jennifer Coates liked the idea. They are great artists; Sirey trains ecosystems of living mutant biologies, Segre conjures unfathomable dreams with weblike gargantua, and Coates captures the brutal horror of springtime in dripping toxic paint. But more important for our mission that night, they are all musicians too.

Here are the songs the sirens sang: