Sasha Cravis and Rachel Yanku came out with me on a busy Monday morning.
I hadn’t been out on the creek in almost a year, and was happy to see things chugging along as usual—tons of dirt being ground up, piles of recycling blowing around.
The usual things were comforting after being away from NYC since February.
There were a few new things, like this perfect movie set.
We pondered how it made sense to build a whole new city block instead of just using an existing one, like the very similar blocks where we each live in Brooklyn and Queens.
Sasha had been studying Philippine creation stories recently and told us one:
“Originally, there was just the sea and sky.”
Then a bird, looking for a place to land, stirred up a fight between sea and sky. Land formed to separate them, and as bamboo sprouted from the land, the bird began to peck at the bamboo, releasing two human forms: Malakas (strength) and Maganda (beauty).
“I believe that the two beings didn’t originally have binary genders,” said Sasha, “but culture and christianity’s influence in the 1900s shifted the story to being man and woman.”
Here is an image that I found online, a sculpture of Malakas and Maganda outside of an administration building at the Visayas State University in Baybay, Leyte. A caption under the photo reads: “… a statue symbolizing the pursuit of knowledge and excellence.” Another shift, but maybe better than strength and beauty.
“How is living in New York as a young artist?” I asked.
“Almost impossible,” they agreed.
We looked at the new high-rises. The land here at the mouth of the Newtown Creek used to seem abandoned, underused, but still somehow inaccessible—
“Now it is inaccessible in a different way,” said Rachel.
But here we were, on the other side of the buildings, making it work somehow.
We noticed the extremely high tide in Greenpoint, even covering the ramp at the end of Manhattan Avenue.
“I have never noticed it like that before,” I said, and I wondered if sea level had risen just in the time I was gone.
While technically that must be true, these particular inches have to do with tidal surge from Hurricane Erin, pushing the ocean up into New York City.
Thank you Sasha and Rachel, for the perfect homecoming.
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