• Tide and Current Taxi: 2006

Elsie Hill made some paintings about the water this year.

So when I asked her if she wanted to go for a ride in the Tide and Current Taxi, she thought it might be fun to try some plein air painting from the boat.

Sunday morning something caught my eye in the Times,

and we headed to Coney Island to see what we could see.

We rowed against the wind to get up to the shipwrecks.

The article in the Times said that the wrecks might be sunken whaling ships.

But the things we saw looked more like old construction barges.

Except for this one, which looked like a submarine.

Elsie set up her easel and began to paint,

while I read.

On the way back we saw groups of men all along the beach taking in nets.

I asked one group what they were catching.

“Whatever is down there.” he said.

Elsie used to take me out in her boat in Savannah.

We would spend whole days in the rivers around her grandmother’s house, and she taught me to throw a cast-net.

We would cast and cast and take in whatever was down there.