Cyrus Amundson

USS Intrepid

November 23, 2009

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Cyrus wanted to take a taxi mission to the USS Intrepid, to make something in the space that the boat left when it was taken away.

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He wanted to fill the gap with some kind of memorial.

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But on the day that the Intrepid was scheduled to move,

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the tugs could not pull her out of the deep silt along the bank and she was stuck there for weeks.

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Dredgers worked around the clock to dig her out and pull her loose.

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So Cyrus decided that maybe we should just visit her in port.

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We left at dawn from just above the security zone that surrounds the Intrepid.

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We figured we could float down outside the zone and sneak up next to the battleship if it seemed safe.

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I was uneasy about the whole thing.

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I thought that if we were aprehended, our situation seemed harder to explain than usual.

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In the rubber rafts, even on a Sunday morning, I expected that we would attract attention.

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But with a mission like this,

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you just take things one step at a time.

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It was getting lighter,

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and it was a beautiful morning to be out on the Hudson River.

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The tide was pulling our boats South quickly,

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and soon the USS Intrepid was in sight,

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Cy got in his boat and prepared his sign.

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The idea was to float right up next to the battleship with a message.

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>It would be the smallest kind of boat next to the biggest.

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>Maybe someone would be up early enough to see us.

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We paddled into the security zone,

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past the dredger and into the slip beside the battleship.

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I couldn’t believe we were so close.

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At first I didn’t know what to make of the sign that Cyrus had made.

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I couldn’t figure out if the ‘Museum of a Lesser War’ referred to the Intrepid or the rubber raft. Was he talking about the Iraq war or ‘The Great War’.

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But when I saw him out there next to the battlship it didn’t seem to matter. We felt so small floating out by the ship, all of those ideas became the same thing; the same scale.

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You see, I think that Cyrus really likes the Intrepid.

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There is something sad about seeing it leave Manhattan.

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Soon there won’t really be anything like it on the waterfront.

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We drove back to Brooklyn around the Southern tip of Manhattan,

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and talked about how much the city has changed even in the short time that we have lived here.

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