Sam, Lex, and I drove out to New Jersey on Saturday to look for the wreck of the Mary Murray.
Lex and I had read about it in the New York Times last year, but Sam had actually seen it. The Mary Murray is visible from I95 close to where Sam grew up in Freehold NJ.
We found a place to put the boat in the water just off the highway.
If the map I copied out of the paper a year ago was accurate,
the Marry Murray should be somewhere up ahead,
where this river, the ‘No Name Creek’, meets the Raritan.
But after paddling for a while we started to wonder. The article about the Marry Murray said that the DEP was trying to remove the ship.
Maybe she was already gone.
But then we came around a bend in the creek,
and there she was.
The Marry Murray is an old Staten Island Ferry, built in 1937.
In 1975 she was taken out of service and sold at auction to George Searle.
He had her towed up here, in fact I think he lives close by in one of the houses that we passed.
He thought he would turn the ferry into a floating restaurant.
But his plans have fallen through.
And now the ship has been sitting here for so long she might be hard to move.
I read all this in the NY Times article.
But walking around on board the boat brought to life a different story…
Something about the ship reminded me of the movie ‘Fitzcarraldo’ or the ‘African Queen’.
It seemed like we were no longer in New Jersey,
and that the ferry was taking us up into some remote Jungle wilderness.
Suddenly we were all aware of a new noise.
Someone had just pulled up along the bank in a truck, and two men got out and came on board the ferry.
We didn’t know quite what to do. It didn’t seem like we should hide out, they might have already seen our boat. It seemed better to wait quietly in case they just left.
We waited until we heard them at the front of the boat,
and then we ran down the back and slipped away.
My heart was racing from our narrow escape.
We never found out who they were – perhaps they were just sightseeing like us.
On the way out we passed another ship.
The paper said that this one once belonged to the shah of Iran.
Sam spotted a beaver under the highway on the way back.
And we chatted about wildlife.
The banks were covered with flowers.
And bees! “Hey, I thought these guys were all dead.” I said. (Something else I read in the paper.)
“The problem was a little overstated,” said Lex. “One day we will probably have nanorobots to pollinate agriculture.”
“Is that what you are working on?” I asked, because I knew he was a scientist. “No, its not really my field.” said Lex. He is a Stem cell researcher at the New York Medical College.
We find the bank where we put in and laoded the boat back on the car.
On the way back over the Raritan river we could just see the Mary Murray.
Frozen in time on a journey up the ‘No Name Creek’.
-Marie Lorenz
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